Bitcoin Forum

There is already a thread about favourite Alt coin, but sadly the arguments there are all about
what is popular, what has been profitable, what is perceived to be good for investing, and what parties are involved.
I see practically *no* arguments about how the alt-coin is designed, i.e. its technical aspects.

So in this thread in contrast let's focus purely on design, and not talk about price, profitability, popularity, people/parties involved. Design aspects include

* consensus model
* protocol
* proof of work algorithm
* difficulty adjustment algorithm
* smart contracts
* utxo/account model
* block size
* block interval
* block chain or graph
* codebase
* security
* censorship resistance
* scalability
* use of zero knowledge proofs
* resource consumption for full nodes or light clients
     * disk usage
     * memory usage
     * bandwidth usage
     * sync from scratch
* decentralization
* emission
* fees
* spam resistance
* (avoiding) wealth concentration
* supply auditability
* cryptographic assumptions
* quantum resistance
* design complexity
* privacy aspects like
     * confidentiality (hiding amounts)
     * stealth addresses
     * tx graph obfuscation/hiding

Note that many of these properties are at odds with each other.
E.g. if you allow 1 GB blocks every minute then resource costs will be huge and you end up very centralized.

Which alt coin do you think made the best design choices and why?

There are thousands of projects in the cryptocurrency market, but they are tokens based on a blockchain that has some or all of these characteristics, and the criterion for comparison is always the fees. Therefore, if you research and divide the available blockchains according to the criteria that I mentioned, you will find that more than 90% of the cryptocurrencies are similar and some things They are related to each other, as the answer to the consensus model question will automatically answer the issue of emitting, censorship resistance, scalability, decentralization, avoiding wealth concentration, which are all sub-points of proof of work or proof of stake.

Do i even have any, i like virtually almost every thing, but let's look at it these way also, that should we have our minds focused on the kind of designs than the offer each coins had come to offer us, they could have some nice and beautiful touch of designs and beauty but the more anticipated one is in their true colour of whom they were and what they represent, it's nothing to us when all a nice looking altcoin brand ended into scam, what's the significance of it nice designs.

When the design is such that the coin creators have no way to get coins cheaply and no way to profit from it, how can it be a scam?

You can design against scams:

* Proof of Work
* Coins can only be obtained by mining (i.e. no premine/mining tax etc)
* High initial difficulty
* Optimized miners available at launch
* Emission not too front loaded
... etc

What drives people to mine a currency that has no value? Even Bitcoin began to be easily mined, as anyone with an account could mine Bitcoin, and the matter became more difficult with the increase in demand, which led to an increase in the price. Proof of Work and mining does not mean that the currency is decentralized, but rather the number of people who manage the full nodes. If the currency is Proof of Work but the block capacity is 1 GB or more, then it is most likely centralized.

High initial difficulty is just to prevent the kind of insta-mines we saw with XCoin aka Darkcoin aka Dash, where thousands of blocks were quickly mined in the first hour.
With a sensible difficulty adjustment algorithm, a high initial difficulty will settle into an appropriate range within a day or two.

Proof of Stake with less premine for the developer or te or mostly the supply are from thr community. Its quite dcary to join a project with so many VCs holding dome huge coins that could dumped the market anytime. Usually this is the set up now but therr are some still honest projects that are gonna be transparent. Also got a working and fast platform.

Crypto jargon you mentioned is too high tech for me to understand. But, I like one thing in altcoins and that's ability to delegate your funds to other accounts without losing custody like Hive blockchain does. So you can make money without having risk to your funds.

My favorite blockchain design focuses on simplicity and elegance [1]

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5429497

Definitely Ethereum for me. Although it's missing some of those features outlined by OP but for the sheer fact that Ethereum has successfully created the best ecosystem in the altcoins category. What's more interesting about Ethereum is that it has created an ecosystem for top tier projects tk build on. For instance, Ethereum has Layer 2 networks that leverages Zero knowledge proof technology.  At least 5 of the top 50 cryptos are inspired by Ethereum and it's EVM methodology.