From quarks, to terracoins, to 42Coin, to catcoins and dogecoins, to sexcoins, and bbqcoins, the world is afloat with numerous digital currencies hitting the market as many are hoping to jump aboard early on the ‘next’ Bitcoin . While several of these Altcoins have managed to generate interest and are rising to impressive values, the majority are simply novelties with little to no future of widespread adoption and usage. However, that hasn’t stopped new digital currencies from being created with their own unique appeal and use cases.
But this has only made it more difficult to choose between so many of the alt-coins. Now, a new site has an answer; create your ‘own’ bitcoin. Launched earlier this month, Coingen.io lets users create their own digital currency. Using the site is easy, one simply enters a name for the coin, uploads an icon image, chooses on a script based or SHA256 proof of work algorithm, and adds figures for block rate, initial value per block, and block halving rate. Once that is done, Coingen charges 0.05 BTC to initiate creation of the new digital currency, with linux and windows based binaries sent upon its completion.
Created by Matt Corallo as a side project, Coingen was sold to Shawn Wilkinson, AKA Super3, soon after it was launched. Citing the reason for the quick sell, Corallo stated in Bitcointalk that
“As some of you are aware, I have lots of other projects going, and I have absolutely 0 time to make this better (and there are tons of ways to do that...). I’ve seen a few offers for buying coins at 1 BTC if feature X or Y were added, but in order to save you the pain of building all the rebranding code like I did, I'm selling coingen.io (including the domain and all the source code) exclusively to the highest bidder (assuming the price is high enough).”
To learn more about the future direction of Coingen, DC Magnates reached out to Super3 who answered that he envisions the site to become more than just a digital currency creator, but a hub for alt-coin development, as he stated “Currently the site is just an empty shell of where I want it to be. I want it to be a marketplace for programmers and entrepreneurs to come together to build awesome new coins. Those who want to create another clone coin will just be throwing money away, but those who want to actually build something will find it nice to have everything in one place.”
In this regard, if a company, school, or game would want to develop its own currency system to reward its community, Coingen could become the destination to not only create a new digital currency, but also find resources for hosted wallets and ongoing support. As the world becomes more digital, Coingen would become a hub for supporting this trend. Growing up in elementary school, teachers would award students with school cash that could be converted for prizes at the end of the year or raffle tickets. Presently, this has evolved at many schools with kids now receiving credit card like products which teachers can fill with points. As such, with kids already moving away from cash based systems at an early age, moving further towards digital school currencies in the near future wouldn’t seem so surprising.
Negative Alt-Coin Impact?
In reaction to Coingen, there has been some debate within bitcoin forums of whether an alt-coin creator is positive or negative for digital currencies. On one hand it can flood the market with countless supply which may devalue existing alt-coins. On the other hand, “the more the merrier” in terms of raising general public awareness towards digital currencies which could increase overall demand. In addition, as per the above example, it the younger generation is adopting early to digital currencies, they are more likely to easily embrace bitcoins and other alt-coins.
Providing his opinion, Wilkinson stated that “Coingen lowers the barrier of entry to creating a coin, you don't have to be master C++ coder to create a coin. This gives the ability for anyone to be able to experiment with cryptocurrency development. Now with a flood of altcoins out there the rules are simple "Innovate or Die." A clone coin from Coingen is not going to get very far, but if you take that source code and add a few new features, the cryptocurrency community will reward you well.”
