Practice StickThis site is dedicated to a project we call Practice Coin, a new cryptocoin. Its aim is to cut through FUD of Altcoin creation process. Specifically, to go through all the steps of doing and launching and running a coin, from scratch, and documenting it all, in detail. Read more about Practice Coin.

The intention is not to make ‘cloning’ tired old coins trivial, in order to support noob scammers. Nor to make money with this particular project, but to learn the coin launch details, by running the services and documenting the choices, costs, effort, gotchas.

[Old Plans]

We want to offer developer and bug bounties, a tiny ICO, find a plausible business model, pull together a community with some semblance of governance. Seems only right to get working both Windows and Linux versions of nodes, wallets, and GPU miners. Set up a mining pool and a block explorer, place the coin on exchanges and maybe even do some trading or market making. Should we even care about airdrops, faucets, dice, miner bounties?

Developer Motivation

A professional software developer’s first inclination is to fork a codebase and do some serious work. But for this project, we will stay away from the familiar and instead focus on things we’ve never done before. Learn from it, document the steps and experiences, maybe work out some tutorials. So, no substantial original code is planned for this project, though we will build from source and validate all the software pieces before releasing them.

As to the kind of coin that we want, would rather not clone Zcash, which we may do some real work with. Also, skip coins that are established, but are kinda “one off” or “proprietary” in their approaches, like Monero, Dash or Pascal.  Ethereum is totally interesting and is way too complicated for this effort.

PoS is popular and “green” in terms of energy consumption, but not as familiar or intuitive as the Bitcoin or Ethereum PoW. Though, the Ethereum crowd claims to wanna switch to PoS. What does that leave as possibilities, a Litecoin derivative?

Altcoin Resources

We have archived two venerable tutorials from the legendary Shakezulu, on cloning Bitcoin (0.8.99 – from four years ago) and cloning Scrypt (Litecoin) [dated 5/27/13].

Altcoin tutorial from an unknown author and related Altcoin or Litecoin cloning guides, questions, and threads. Most date back to 2014 and are based on 0.10 or earlier releases of Bitcoin / Litecoin, and are rather obsolete by now.

To see just how many Cryptocoins have been created, you can review a long list, or track their provenance on a map.

A two-year-old first edition of an O’Reilly book “Mastering Bitcoin – Unlocking digital currencies” is on Github.