Bitcoin Forum

What risks are involved with setting up a new crypto?

A 51% on a new decentralized coin?

I guess you would recommend scrypt..

The other thing is to have lots of miners supporting the system, and multiple pools.

A new crypto really does need to be embraced doesnt it   :-\

The risks financially are minimal but I would say the greater risk is with your online reputation.

Take time to think about your new coin and plan set goals about what you want to achieve with it and stick too them.

Also make sure you listen to the community and their ideas, there will always be someone with more knowledge and understanding of Crypto's.

Final thing, it's not what you know, it's who you know that helps.

Good luck.

You'll be spending time and effort and, as the above poster said, possibly online reputation, on it.  We haven't yet seen an altcoin launched with a million-dollar advertising campaign, but launching an advertising campain while there are hardly any available coins would be at best problematic and probably contribute to the worst kind of pump-and-dump, with the price crashing hard again immediately after the ad campaign concludes.

I would say the odds of launching an altcoin ever becoming financially profitable are at best small unless you are either scamming or  have a credible solution for a problem that Bitcoin itself doesn't solve.  Right now Bitcoin is weakest in micropayments (due to high tx fees) reliable rapid clearing (slow block/confirmation times) and for full nodes, setup time/costs (for downloading the enormous blockchain).  But these three things are related such that you cannot make any of them better without making one or both of the others worse unless you come up with a better fundamental design.

I would advise against both Scrypt and Bitcoin-style proof-of-work.  If your coin is ever listed on exchanges, both will attract mining behavior that works like an attack.

Possibly the best thing you can do for your altcoin's long-term value is putting up a commerce site where you actually sell stuff taking the altcoin as payment and put some kind of very easy to install client on as an ultra-simple one-click download.  Whether you can do that profitably or not I don't know. 

A better question would be "What is the reward?" Unless you have a truly revolutionary idea (and it doesn't seem like you do), the answer is probably none. It's harsh but true. The time to be Satoshi was 2008.