Bitcoin Forum

Litecoin?

Namecoin (NMC) was launched in April 2011.  It was before LTC and IIRC it was the first altcoin.

Maybe Terracoin? That was another early alt coin, but I don't know if it was out before Litecoin.

geistgeld or tenebrix were prior to ltc not sure about namecoin. sunnyking had a list up on github ages ago. don't know if it still exists or not.

i am not sure which one was 1st but i think NMC was..and LTC is the best :D

Why is LTC good, what can you use it for besides to buy bitcoins?

Where was IXC in there? I thought that was first.

LTC came to deal with the sha asic issue and failed! now we have scypt asic miners. at the moment, i see zero use for LTC>

there are some reasons, here is one..

mining BTC vs LTC

u can mine 1 BTC block in 10-15min and LTC block 2-4min

Not LTC, Tenebrix was the first scrypt coin, but had bad distribution and died soon.

As far as I know Namecoin was the first of all, then Ixcoin. Timekoin (with other codebase) also is pretty old.

yeah, Timekoin was php and required a server.

Bitcoin..

The coin it was based on "Bit Gold" had it's white paper post dated to make it appear it came out after Bitcoin but it didn't.

Bitcoin was mostly likely an alt of.. Bit Gold, Wei Dai’s b-money, hashcash and other concepts..

making Bitcoin the First Altcoin ?

It was definitively NMC!
But for some reasons I dont understand LTC was the one which was getting more valuable.

Got proof to back up this assertion?

coindesk ? LOL

http://www.coindesk.com/linguistic-researchers-name-nick-szabo-author-bitcoin-whitepaper/

part of what i said before i took from that story ;)

Namecoin wasn't intended as a currency to buy things, but rather, as a currency to buy key=>value pairs in the blockchain.

The value of namecoin depends upon how much demand there is to store things in their blockchain.

With OpenNic now making it easy for regular people to resolve .bit domains, it is possible that demand will go up.

There also are some none DNS related reasons to use namecoin that may cause a price increase, like that new web directory that is using the u/ and i/ namespace within namecoin.

Can people view .bit domains without using specialist software yet? I mean can they just type a .bit domain url into a regular browser and view a webpage?

Why do people sometimes call it Tenebrix/Fairbrix?

Yes, just set up your DNS to use OpenNic -

http://www.opennicproject.org/

I put the two nearest IP addresses in my home router DNS server and instantly every computing device on my home network could resolve .bit domains.

http://mapofcoins.com/

Not 100% accurate. Though awesome.

Is there no way to do it without setting up your DNS to use OpenNic? I think .bit domains will remain a niche if you can't just give someone a url they can use without setting up anything. They will only get mass adoption when a .bit just works straight out of the box.

Out of the box DNS lookup only works with the domains your ISP DNS resolves, and that will probably remain ICANN controlled domains.

A lot of people already change that because they don't want their ISP sending them adverts and other crap when they mis-type a URL or attempt to visit an expired domain, an increasing problem.

Will your local restaurant ever use .bit?

Probably not, AFAIK the major search engines only index ICANN sites. If you rely upon search results for business, a .bit TLD isn't for you.

But for many of us, we have uses where google etc. indexing isn't even desired, and we don't want to have to give our real name just to register a domain name - as the ICANN registrars currently require.

It's not for everybody, and isn't the right TLD for all businesses. But for many of us it is a godsend.

And now it is really easy to set up networks to resolve it, you don't have to run your own DNS anymore.