Due to the growing fame of Bitcoin, more and more investors are initiating to adopt it as a potential asset. Although it is notorious for its price volatility, it is not as crazy as it was years ago. But it is also true that it is nearly impossible to expect Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies to be a hundred percent beneficial. That's the point where we need to look for Bitcoin alternatives.
We all know that Bitcoin has certain limitations. There are other currencies that are working to overcome those limitations.
In this connection, Coinbase, a leading Bitcoin investment platform, has released other coins in the previous years that you can invest in. This site also offers an incentive of $10 for the users who deposit at least $100 for the first time.
Here in this article, we are going to deliver a very good piece of information regarding the most popular Bitcoin alternatives for your investments.
Why Bitcoin Dominates?
According to coinmarketcap.com rankings, Bitcoin (BTC) is standing in the number 1 position and is by far the most valued cryptocurrency available. Its market cap is $179,802,817,673 and it trades for $10,072.92 per coin. This huge market cap makes it nearly eight times more valuable than ETH, which stands on number 2in the ranking of valuable cryptocurrency.
Being the first crypto coin introduced in the cryptocurrency market, It became a dominating coin as compared to other coins.BTC was created in 2008 and remained the center of attention until 2011 when some more cryptocurrencies were created.Let’s discuss bitcoin code alternatives.
Ethereum
This could be said to be a new arrival in the cryptocurrency world compared to BTC. Introduced in 2015 by Vitalik Buterin, it is quite successful in grabbing the #2 position shortly thereafter. Surprisingly enough, it continues to hold that position with authority.
This coin was launched in the market with an aim to deliver smart contracts and dApps or distributed apps. Unfortunately, these features are missing in BTC. This technology of smart contracts prompts when it meets a certain condition. They in a way function as an arbitrator, supervising the transactions, and observing the parties following the terms they originally agreed to.
Both parties should first agree on the terms, and the contract is set up to execute on those terms.
Ripple
This coin was launched in the cryptocurrency market to provide a fast method of payment exchange. Ripple is the name of a platform and XRP is the coin used to transact on the platform. This coin has a specific place in international transactions. Through Ripple, you can find the shortest path between two people wanting to transact.
It also allows transactions to be performed in other coins. Ripple charges commissions as low as $0.00001, which is needed to prevent DDoS attacks.
To receive more recognition and value, Ripple also allows other coins to be transacted on its platform. more valuable. Ripple is also more efficient than BTC with an average transaction time of four seconds.
Litecoin
This coin has several matching traits like BTC but much faster and cheaper. Even its own creators admit that LTC is a clone of BTC. LTC uses an open-source protocol.
Just like BTC, LTC is also mined with the help of proof of work (PoW). During PoW, the miners solve a mathematical problem and verify it. This whole procedure consumes big amounts of energy. To tackle this issue of energy consumption, LTC introduced the script algorithm.
Using Scrypt, the miners can mine LTC by using regular computers, rather than having the pools of powerful computers engaged to mine BTC. The average block mining speed of LTC is 2.5 minutes compared to BTC’s 10 minutes.
Bitcoin Cash
There's no need to get confused. Bitcoin Cash has Bitcoin in its name. Actually, it is introduced as a hard-fork of BTC. The Bitcoin community decided to fork the BTC code into a new coin. This initiative resulted in a bigger size block, from 2MB to 8MB. BCH was created on August 1st, 2017.
The major driving force for creating BCH was to increase the speed of transactions. Before this, BTC’s average speed was a seven-second per transaction. When it was compared to Visa, which processes transactions at 24,000 per second, the only choice was to update the BTC codebase by forking it. This step to introduce BTC fork made it easy for BTC to continue with minor updates while creating BCH as a new line of code (and coin) based on the BTC codebase.
Final Thoughts
We can conclude by saying that though Bitcoin is a popular coin in the cryptocurrency market, picking a winner is speculation. Bitcoin has a number of limitations. And there are several other coins available in the market as its alternatives providing solutions to Bitcoins limitations.
