Alternative Payment Technologies

A few alternatives to Bitcoin

Ron Grossron@bitcoil.co.il

Imitation is Flattery

• Only 21,000,000 coins

• Bitcoin is open source

• You can change the code and create Bitcoin2 with more coins?!

Well, it already happened …15+ times in the last 2 years.

Bitcoin Alternatives (“alts”)

Namecoin

Litecoin

PPCoinFreicoin

Ripple

Devcoin

Solidcoin

Tenebrix

Rucoin

IxCoin

BBQCoinCoiledCoin

BitcoinX

Open Transactions

Modifications

• Number of coins

• Inflation schedule

• Mining algorithm

• Mining speed

• New non-monetary operations

• Support for many currencies (P2P dollars and euros)

NamecoinLaunched April 2011

• Motivation: Free the internet

• Distributed Domain Names (piratebay.bit)

• New operations: Register/renew/list name

• “Merged Mined” with Bitcoin

LitecoinLaunched Oct 2011

• Motivation: Everyone is a miner

• Bitcoin mining was only done by strong graphics card

• Soon dominated by custom costly hardware (ASIC)

• Litecoin changed the mining algorithm so normal computers can mine

PPCoinLaunched Aug 2012

• Motivation: Remove the miners

• Bitcoin mining costs money for hardware and electricity

• Let people mine by holding PPCoins(In addition to miners)

• Complicated security model

FreicoinLaunched Dec 2012

• Motivation: Tax the rich

• Today, the rich get richer

• In Freicoin, the rich get poorer

• Negative interest (demurage)

• Money disappears from you and goes to miners

RippleLaunched Jan 2013

• Motivation: Replace banks but not your currency

• Not a blockchain, not a fork!

• Unlike the others, a strong startup with high profile personnel.

• Represents money as debt/trust/IOUs

Ripple

Charlie JaneBob

Ripple

Charlie JaneBob

$100 trust $70 trust

$1,000,00 trust

$200,000 trust

Gateway = Bank

Ripple

Alts Market Cap

Litecoin Namecoin Devcoin PPCoin Terracoin NovaCoin Ixcoin

83%

7%

2.6%

2.6%

2.1%

1.6%

0.3%

230K BTC = $10M = 2% of Bitcoin

Summary

• Exciting times for crypto-currencies!

• Lots of noise, scams, and dead projects

• A few interesting, strong projects

• Still small compared to Bitcoin

Questions?

References• https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=67.0

• https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Category:Alternative_cryptocurrencies

• https://ripple.com/wiki/

• http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ripple

• http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alternatives