Unlike some other digital currencies, feathercoin updates regularly to incorporate new features and enhancements, including protections from abuse and forking by group mining. FeathercoinД«ased upon litecoin, feathercoin adjusts its mining difficulty more often than litecoin and was announced in April 2013. Unlike bitcoin, primecoinвЂ™s mining difficulty increases slightly with each new coin created, scaling more evenly than bitcoinвЂ™s bigger shift in mining difficulty every 2016 blocks. Instead of relying on bitcoinвЂ™s вЂњHashcashвЂќ algorithm, primecoin finds long Cunningham chains вЂ“ a certain sequence of prime numbers named after the mathematician AJC Cunningham вЂ“ to build value into the currency. PrimecoinДЄ cryptocurrency like bitcoin, primecoin differs at its core because it uses a totally separate mathematical basis for mining. Peercoin has the fourth-largest market cap among вЂњaltcoinsвЂќ as these alternative digital currencies are known, according to, which tracks emerging and traded currencies. PeercoinДЄnother variant of the bitcoin-like peer-to-peer currency principle, peercoin promises increased efficiency of mining, improved security and safeguards to avoid abuse by group mining, which has recently been highlighted as a potential flaw with bitcoin. The currency values and domain names are stored within the blockchain record, which limits the total number of namecoins to 21m, with each coin divisible down to eight decimal places. By acting as its own DNS, the currency operates outside the regular internet and therefore outside the governance of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann).

A cryptocurrency, namecoin also acts as a decentralised DNS вЂ“ the protocol on the internet that turns human-comprehensible website names such as into addresses understandable by machines. NamecoinДЄlso based on bitcoin, namecoin is another opensource offshoot. In fact, it is based on the bitcoin protocol, but instead of requiring extraordinary computing power to mine effectively, can be mined efficiently using standard computers due to its algorithm originally designed by Dr Colin Percival for the Tarsnap secure online backup service for Linux and other opensource operating systems. Litecoin, a peer-to-peer opensource digital currency, could be described as an offshoot of bitcoin. Like bitcoin, litecoin is another crytography-based digital currency, which has also seen a dramatic rise in value in recent months. Here are nine alternatives to think about before putting your time, effort and money into bitcoin. As they are based on peer-to-peer protocols, no one computer controls the currencies, but networks keep track of all transactions made using these digital currencies, but they do not know what the coins were actually used for вЂ“ just the ID of the computer 'wallet' they move from and to.

Bitcoin core alternatives