With all of the altcoin rage and the random loss/gain of trust in bitcoin recently, why is this stackexchange named "bitcoin" instead of "cryptocurrencies"? I mean, it seems like most of the question are over the bitcoin protocol, which encompasses bitcoin and most altcoins, but some are specific to altcoins and some are specific to bitcoin.
1 Answer
When the Bitcoin.SE site was launched in August 2011, the only viable cryptocurrency was Bitcoin. Even Litecoin wasn't released until October 2011. Namecoin had only existed for a couple of months (and arguably isn't really a cryptocurrency itself).
That's the reason why. Perhaps this site should be renamed to something more general, but that's a different question.
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1Actually, I read somewhere that the proposal started out named "Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies", which was shortened by SE staff to just "Bitcoin" when the site started into the beta. Source: In the comments here: meta.bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/345/5406– Murch ModCommented Mar 25, 2014 at 0:36