Bitcoin Forum

Okay so I have been developing (trying to) an Altcoin for fun and for education. So I got stuck on the generating the merkle root and genesis block. But I was wondering... What would happen if I made some minor code edits (ie coins rewarded per block and number of.coins allowed) what would happen if I just compiled and run that with the original genesis block and merkle root of bitcoin. Wpuld I be mining bitcoin or my own coin?

Provided you've replaced the default DNS Seeds (the initial list of peers for a newly-downloaded client to connect to) with some of your own, and none of the addresses point to the bitcoin network, you should be golden.

You might also want to modify your checkpoints to make sure that in the case of accidental connection to the bitcoin network, your blockchain isn't overwritten by the larger one of Bitcoin.

It really depends on the specifics of the particular edits that you make.

If you change your code so that the initial block subsidy is less than 50 BTC, then you might have a problem accepting the Genesis block since it has 50 BTC.

If you change your code so that the initial block subsidy is allowed to be larger than 50 BTC, then your client will download the entire current bitcoin blockchain and you will be mining bitcoin.  However, anytime you solve a block, if your miner tries to create a subsidy greater than 25 BTC, the entire network will ignore your block and it will be orphaned, therefor you'll never get the reward.

How might someone go about doing something like this?

Well, right now there is an altcoin almost every day

Most if not all of them are just a pump and dump scheme where early adopters make their profit, some point a few 100 google EC2 instances at it for a few hours and then dump the coins.

Followed this live for YAC where i was lucky enough to solo mine 18000 coins on a single cpu and trade it in for 15btc

now YAC is quite dead and ppl wait for the next chance

i dont think we need 1000 altcoins

But if you want to make profit fast...

Why exactly would you say YAC is dead? I don't think it will die until someone finds an efficient implementation for gpus. Until then it's different to the rest of the altcoins.

Well I never said I was going to release it... Its more of a hobby of mine... I thought Bitcoin was interesting and wanted to make a coin myself.

Dang, nice!

Whoah developing a coin is extremly difficult and takes a lot of knowledge sure your up to it?

Goodluck on this adventure.