Which altcoins are Bitcoin's main competitors?
Alternative Cryptocurrency
Bitcoin is currently dominating the cryptocurrency. Competition to Bitcoin is necessary. There has to be alternatives to the cryptocurrency that dominates the market. Many other digital currencies emerged, following the success of Bitcoin, to imitate that success. From a time when Bitcoin used to be the only cryptocurrency, and we now live in a world where it is only one of the various possible options to invest in when it comes to cryptocurrencies. This blog post discusses Bitcoin’s main competitors.
Many of the altcoins share the basic framework that is provided by Bitcoin. Therefore most of the altcoins are peer-to-peer. They involve a mining process by which the users can solve mathematical problems to unlock some blocks, and offer practical and cost-friendly ways to make transactions on the internet. However, even with many common and overlapping properties, altcoins are all different from each other. Altcoins are different from Bitcoin with a variety of procedural variations, which includes different proof-of-work algorithms, different methods by which users can sacrifice time and energy consumed to mine the blocks, and some enhancement to the application which enables the user to have increased anonymity.
Bitcoin’s Main Competitors for 2019
Bitcoin’s Main Competitor 1 – Ethereum
The first of Bitcoin’s main competitors is Ethereum. Launched in 2015 by Vitalik Buterin, this sits at the second place on the list of the most valuable cryptocurrency, with a market capitalisation of $64.35 billion. The price of Ethereum grew almost $1400, from being a mere $9 in January of 2017 to a whopping $1389 in January 2018.
What makes Ethereum different?
Bitcoin is just a single cryptocurrency, while Ethereum has a unique set of features to offer in addition to that. It provides the developers with a platform, using which they can create blockchain-based smart contracts and decentralised apps.
It was also the first in the market to introduce the technology of Smart Contracts. These are agreements that are unique. Whenever circumstances meet a pre-defined condition, the Smart Contracts execute themselves.
In the year 2019, Ethereum is set to increase its scalability by upgrading its technology from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake.
Bitcoin’s Main Competitor 2 – Litecoin
Created all the way back in 2011, it makes it one of the oldest altcoins in the industry. It was the creation of Charlie Lee, an ex-Google employee. Litecoin is another cryptocurrency with some improvements.
Litecoin was launched to overcome or mitigate some of the weaknesses of Bitcoin, mainly the slow speed of transactions.
The cryptocurrency is a very unpredictable market where many coins could go in and out of the market pretty quickly. The fact that Litecoin has been in the market for more than seven years speaks volumes about it. It has developed into one of the best altcoins having an enormous market capitalisation of $8.2 billion.
It really boomed in the year 2017 and has given a marvellous return, when it rose from just $4 in the month January to $350 in the month of December same year. That’s a massive return of almost 9,000%!
What makes Litecoin different?
Litecoin has made a significant improvement to the technology of Bitcoin by increasing the speed of transactions. It is called Litecoin because it is almost four times faster than Bitcoin. When a typical transaction with Bitcoin involved takes nearly 10 minutes to complete, a Litecoin transaction is finished in just 2.5 minutes. Thus, Litecoin can complete more transactions in the same amount of time than Bitcoin, making it more scalable.
Bitcoin’s Main Competitor 3 – NEO
Another one of Bitcoin’s main competitors is NEO. NEO was formally known as AntShares. It originated in 2014 and the designer of it was Chinese man Da Hongfei . It is the leading cryptocurrency that has been developed in China.
NEO has a close resemblance to Ethereum. It is another platform that has designed a cryptocurrency for the development of Decentralized applications (Dapps), ICOs, and Smart contracts. Because of these similarities to Ethereum, people often call NEO for the “Chinese Ethereum”.
NEO established itself as one of the best altcoins of the year 2017 and has provided the investors with tremendous returns. In January 2017, Its value was $0.16, and it rose to about $162 in January 2018. That’s about a net growth of 101,000%. That is an excellent return on investment. This growth in the value of NEO is enormous!
The support from the Chinese government and its robust technology is one of the differentiating factors behind the driven growth for NEO.
What makes NEO unique?
Similar to Ethereum, NEO adds to that by offering a platform for the development of smart contracts and Dapps. NEO has many more technological advantages over Ethereum to offer. The most dominant benefit is the speed of transaction. NEO can handle roughly 10,000 transactions each second, while the Ethereum can only support just 15 transactions every second.
NEO supports programming in multiple languages like C#, Go, C++ and Java. On the contrary, Ethereum supports just one language i.e. Solidity.
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