
You can now create a Bitcoin clone by filling out a simple webform - BlueMatt
http://coingen.io
======
menubar
This whole alt-coin thing is just a passing fad. I recently cashed out all my
BitCoins and put the money into Beanie Baby Collectables. They're these cool
stuffed toys that everybody is collecting these days. I was able to get a
bunch of them at a very reasonable price range. Their value is bound to
skyrocket in the future as more and more people get into it.

~~~
drcode
You should also look into the US Dollar- I hear people are going crazy over
that one too... and since it's lost 98% of its value in the last 100 years it
is bound to rebound any day now.

~~~
scilro
I don't understand why losing 98% of value over a 100-year period is supposed
to be a pejorative. That implies a very steady, <2% rate of inflation per
year, which is what allows wages to keep up with inflation.

~~~
coryfklein
Wait, inflation allows wages to keep up with inflation? Care to rephrase that
one?

------
gesman
And you can print your own money by writing "This is 100 dollars bill" and
sending it to printer multiple times.

The only remaining task is to convince others to use it :)

~~~
nwh
Interestingly enough, lots of consumer printing software will not print images
of US currency. Photoshop will absolutely not allow you to even open images of
it.

~~~
ChikkaChiChi
What is printing software? I can Google '100 Dollar US Bill', download and
print it.

I think you think printers work different than they do.

~~~
lt
[http://fstoppers.com/photoshop-wont-let-you-work-with-
images...](http://fstoppers.com/photoshop-wont-let-you-work-with-images-of-
currency)

~~~
ChikkaChiChi
Thanks for the link. I finally found a proper US note and the new ones are in
fact blocked from being edited in Photoshop.

------
zaroth
Thanks for building this, and welcome to HN BlueMatt! If you can edit the
headline, you might want to prefix with 'Show HN'.

I'm curious what does the altcoin use for peer discovery? Do you get code for
a DNS seed too?

There was an interesting discussion on bitcoin-dev mailing list the last
couple days about whether it makes sense to enable merge-mining on new
altcoins. It's far from settled, but it's another idea for a feature you would
want to toggle.... Also the scrypt difficulty parameters! OK, at some point
this is just 'cheating', right? :-)

BTW, I think if you know Bitcoin enough to want to create an altcoin, you
would trust Matt Corallo / BlueMatt enough to know your 0.01 BTC is safe.

EDIT: Wow, look at them go:
[http://coingen.io/status.html](http://coingen.io/status.html)

------
ck2
Who runs the nodes for bootstrap?

If the server that runs this is US based and they allow trademarks through,
you'll get a C&D within a week. Lawyers make their money googling for this
stuff.

All someone has to do is register "paypal" or "amazon" or "exxon" etc. and the
fun will be over shortly.

Creator might want to take their name and home address off the domain
registration.

~~~
p8952
Displaying the names of unconfirmed entries is also probably not the best
idea: [http://coingen.io/status.html](http://coingen.io/status.html)

~~~
infinita740
Looks like someone followed the "advice" of ck2, ebaycoin, paypal and
amazoncoin are in this page.

~~~
deaconblues
As is zoidbergcoin, which is a coin I could get behind.

~~~
jolan
Once again, the conservative, sandwich-heavy portfolio pays off for the hungry
investor.

------
hayksaakian
I don't want to get picky, but wouldn't cloning litecoin be objectively
superior? Cloning bitcoin just leaves your currency to the ASICS from the get
go, at least with scrypt, everybody has a decent shot at mining early.

\---

Having read the site, I noted scrypt was an option.

It should really be the default.

Otherwise Great work, this is really cool!

------
ChikkaChiChi
If the Internet has taught me anything it's that the next form of currency
will be cats. You can take pictures of them, add words in impact font, or take
videos of them. You then generate tons of money somehow when you mother shares
them in a forwarded email (I think).

I have therefore started mining cats. Turns out when you put 30 of them in a
room they generate more 'interest' than the best Bitcoin mining outfits.

~~~
slaxo
There's a coin for that! [http://catcoins.biz/](http://catcoins.biz/)

------
gus_massa
Why there is not a bcrypt option for Proof of Work Algorithm? (Technical
question: There are a lot of AltCoins out there. Why no one proposed a AltCoin
where the Proof of Work Algorithm is based in bcrypt?)

~~~
rjzzleep
a lot of them use scrypt, so you can't use asic mining. in my opinion that is
the single biggest flaw in bitcoin. I bet a whole bunch of people are laughing
their asses off. something we will probably see in the next couple of years

~~~
MWil
can you explain the disadvantages of allowing asic mining?

~~~
haakon
Not everybody has ASICs, so it limits the number of people who can compete. In
theory, this could create a centralisation effect. In practice, that seems to
happen anyway due to mining pools.

~~~
verroq
You can always use P2Pool
([http://whatisp2pool.com](http://whatisp2pool.com)). Decentralised mining.

------
aristidb
I'm not sure if this is a parody.

~~~
haakon
Regardless of intention, I see it as a kind of performance art project: it
underlines the absurdity of the massproduction of innovationless altcoins. It
speaks to how a successful cryptocurrency requires something more than just
tweaking a few parameters and recompiling; it requires a skilled developer
able to maintain the system and handle crises, it requires a network effect,
it requires a meaningful purpose.

~~~
betterunix
Yes, a "meaningful purpose" is clearly necessary:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogecoin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogecoin)

~~~
hayksaakian
Amusement is a purpose unfulfilled by most altcoins

dogecoin is amusing

~~~
rjbwork
Very amusing, such cryptocurrency, much means of exchange!

------
tlarkworthy
Surely this is useful though, despite others claims it is a parody?

Can this be used to create a distributed transaction system for some arbitrary
application? E.g. create a massively multilayer game with its own underlying
transaction safe economy.

I thought the block chain was useful in itself, forgetting about the currency
implications. Its a good data structure. Cloning it seems mega useful for
putting it to work elsewhere..

~~~
sharpneli
Pretty much all of the benefits of Bitcoin stem from the concept of
blockchain, not from particular instance of it.

One has to keep this in mind when investing in Bitcoin. One doesn't invest in
general future of cryptocurrencies, one simply invests in the blockchain that
just happened to be first.

It is indeed a highly useful data structure. One can implement things such as
verifiable online gambling (one where casino cannot cheat without being
detected) with it. Basically it simply solves a byzantine generals problem.

The proof of work doesn't even need to be a hash. Primecoin searches for
chains of prime numbers. As long as the work is easy to verify and hard to
calculate with some sort of scaling it can be used. It would be nice to see
things like Salesmancoin where the proof of work is partial solutions to
traveling salesman problem. Or perhaps protein folding?

------
lafar6502
Every person on this planet should have her own currency.

------
davidw
Perhaps related to this?
[http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/12/how...](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/12/how-
and-why-bitcoin-will-plummet-in-price.html)

------
iYuzo
This is a great segue for the "pump and dump" scheme. Essentially you can
create your own coin and mine it with your buddies. Then create a mini
exchange for the coin and target the older, less tech savvy people - who won't
be able to tell the difference between Bitcoins and a more obfuscated virtual
currency. Basically you'll accumulate the virtual coins for free and sell them
off for a profit. Maybe I'm missing something but it feels like all the
ingredients are present.

------
paulnewmanseyes
Ten confirmations in, my coin still isn't showing up. I guess the site's
overwhelmed, but I wouldn't recommend others spend any money until the
backlog's cleared.

~~~
tobias2014
The site (now) says: "Note that payment is currently processed semi-manually,
and thus there may be significant lag between payment and build"

------
dave_sullivan
I was thinking about this the other day, that people will start making their
own crypto currencies, trying to cash in on a new currency and have it work
out like it did for the early adopters of BTC. These currencies will be very
volatile, but all of them will become part of a new Forex landscape. If you
think there's a lot of speculators now working with bitcoin, wait until people
start trying to play arbitrage with different crypto currencies. The new Wild
West...

~~~
granfalloon
This has actually been going on for a while. Check out www.cryptsy.com -- I
think there are already over 50 crypto currencies being traded there, with
more being added regularly. People are making tons of money on the initial
pumps and dumps of all of them.

~~~
pistle
There's a sucker born every minute, but how far can the pyramid go? Is it a
snake eating its own tail? Make a bunch, try to leverage that up a level? The
losers will eventually be zeroed out.

------
ChikkaChiChi
I believe this emphatically proves the point that cryptocurrencies are not at
all different from Chuck E. Cheese tokens.

------
chegra
I was going to do this
too[[https://twitter.com/xyzgra/status/408947104455745536](https://twitter.com/xyzgra/status/408947104455745536)].
Oh well. Congrats.

------
wellboy
I just created Hackernews Coin. They give you a website link that you need to
refresh. Now, I need to wait...

It's awesome how the crypto-currency ecosystem becomes harder and harder to
kill with hacks like this.

~~~
iSnow
Actually, I'd say that developments like this help to kill the crypto-currency
ecosystem.

------
lazyjones
Funny idea, but why trust these binaries not to mine for the author?

~~~
nwh
BlueMatt runs some of the build testing for the real daemon, so they're
trustworthy as hell.

------
pawelropa
My guess is, in long term bitcoin price will fall. Eventually multiple
services will add other currencies next to bitcoin.

------
fjcaetano
This is one of the stupidest things I've ever seen. I can't even begin to
explain...

------
brainburn
Where's the API ?

~~~
omphalos
You might be able to use dev tools to generate the curl request.

~~~
nadaviv
Its a post request to coingen.io/create.json with the arguments: coinname,
abrev, customload, source, hidden, pow, blockrate, initvalue, halfrate, port
and icon (the 256x256 icon file).

------
tim333
hackernewscoin?

------
a3voices
I knew it was just a matter of time before someone made this. Nice!

Maybe a good feature would be to generate an html homepage for the coin, as
well as a forum post for the alt coins section in Bitcointalk. Also a coin
icon generator.

Lastly, perhaps charge the fee after the person can see it's all there.

~~~
pyalot2
Also automatically setup the github or bitbucket repo, create a subreddit and
you could also throw in an exchange with the new homepage.

