True and “false” cryptocurrencies: who is who?

There are now more than 800 cryptocurrencies. At least a hundred are traded on exchanges in one way or another and have at least minimal fame. What motivates their creators, and what is a true cryptocurrency?

Today on the Internet you can find cryptocurrencies for every taste and color. For example, on the Livecoin exchange the number of supported pairs is already measured in hundreds. According to some reports,  the number of known cryptocurrencies exceeds 800. So why are there so many of them? What makes developers produce more and more forks and altcoins? 

If you study the market, even superficially, you can find at least several main reasons that push the creators to release a new coin.

_{There is no limit to perfection}

The first, and perhaps the most obvious incentive is the desire to improve existing cryptocurrencies, to add something that, in the opinion of the creators, the community lacks. For Litecoin, it was transaction speed and fees. The author of DASH wanted to improve and improve the anonymity of bitcoin, ultimately creating a separate cryptocurrency.  Monero, Zcoin - focused on security. Ethereum is essentially not even a cryptocurrency, but a virtual machine for executing smart contracts, and the ability to pay with ether is more of a by-product. 

Even DOGECOIN, perceived by many as a curiosity, has its own technical innovations.

All these cryptocurrencies are united by a focus on development, community interest and the presence of real technological innovations.

_{Just like everyone else}

Over the past few years, a trend has emerged that does not bode well for the community and the cryptocurrency industry, namely, an attempt to integrate blockchain into any product, even if it does not make any sense. This was the case several years ago with Big Data, neural networks, and even earlier with the infamous “dot-com” boom. 

Not every software product whose description includes blockchain is a cryptocurrency, and in many cases such a symbiosis is not only useless, but also degrades the product. We will not give examples of such solutions, because their names are legion.

_{How is this not regulated? And we are ours...!}

This category includes all attempts by government institutions to “make their own Bitcoin from the National Bank” and other attempts to collect the name “crypto”, the word blockchain and try to cobble it together with centralized management, artificial emission and other attributes of “keep them out!”..

The very ideology of cryptocurrency, and bitcoin in particular, is complete decentralization, one of the tools of which is blockchain. And the basis of the Bitcoin community is the free market. Price is determined by demand, and supply is limited in nature and supports demand. This is in no way compatible with the “printing press” and state control of emissions. 

Of course, this state of affairs is due, on the one hand, to the tradition of statesmen to control everything, and on the other, to the extremely low technical literacy of civil servants. But let it be on their conscience, but it is clearly not worth considering such “crypto surrogates” as cryptocurrencies.

_{EASY MONEY!!!}

And finally, the last one for today, but probably the first most common incentive is money. The desire to quickly grab more and run to spend it on beer, girls, cars and other attributes of a rich life. 

The creators of such “type-coins” usually do not bother themselves with full development. Since the crypto community is open and most cryptocurrencies provide their source code, copying is not a problem. 

The source code of some more or less successful cryptocurrency is taken, a simple change in the code changes the name, for example, to “VasyaCoin”, and now “a new innovative cryptocurrency that will take over the world!” is sweeping across the planet.

In fact, everything ends quickly and simply. Since such fakes do not represent any real value, finding people willing to mine them is not so easy. But our heroes don’t need this. Such trash is brought to the exchanges, where conditions are milder, traded for some time, after which everyone happily forgets about it (including the genius creator).

Of course, not all possible sources of inspiration for the creators are listed, but these seem to us the most common and obvious. But if you see a cryptocurrency that clearly falls into any category other than the first, our recommendation is to stay away from it.