Bitcoin Forum

When I registered in late 2013, most of the coins being released were based on Litecoin but with a different name/logo and slightly different specifications (e.g. different coin supply, faster/slower block generation, etc.). The first altcoin I tried mining was Kittehcoin, followed by Coinye. Looking at the announcements board, it seems that there aren't quite as many altcoins based on Litecoin anymore and the popularity of the scrypt algorithm seems to have dropped for new coins. I'm guessing this is due to scrypt now being dominated by ASICs.

Is there still any interest in coins based on Litecoin? And if not, then what is the coin that most altcoins are based on these days? Peercoin? Blackcoin? Darkcoin?

Bitcoin ffs.

If you see a qt window that looks a lot like bitcoins, 99% chance they're based on bitcoin.

There's also a 99% chance that 99% of them are made by sleazeballs that want nothing but coin control. Saying that knowing full well theres >5000, almost 6000 coin threads on this forum.

Here: http://www.mapofcoins.com/

Litecoin has been hopelessly out of date for a while. If the development had stayed active on it you would probably see more forks. But now there's Pfennig (https://github.com/project-bitmark/pfennig) which is based on Bitcoin 0.9.4 and modified to scrypt. So forking a legacy currency like Litecoin isn't really worth it these days.

Bitcoin is "hopelessly out-of-date". Paper/cloth/plastic bills like the USD are "hopelessly out-of-date".

Money has nothing to do with esoteric tech culture or hipsterism.

Money is 100% about liquidity...
That's why LTC is still a rock solid #2...
And only 2 coins matter right now (because I think XRP volume is largely fake).

http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/volume/24-hour/

There are many Peercoin clones now (Blackcoin, Hyperstake etc.). People seem to understand that an altcoin to have value should solve some of the problems of Bitcoin, and Peercoin solves the high energy consumption. And Peercoin is nice for pumpers & dumpers too, because it allows coins to be designed with high "stake rewards".

Some of them, like Blackcoin, now are more than clones and implementing own innovations.

Not really. While it's out of date compared to '2.0' projects like NXT, BTS, Ethereum ect there's still a lot of development going on. 0.10.0 has a good amount of new stuff including RESTful nodes and such. Bitcoin development is orders of magatude more active than Litecoin. Which is why it makes a lot more sense to fork a project that stays update with Bitcoin.

No  there isn't, and I think the main reason is the Scrypt ASICs. A lot of those coins had as the main selling point the "ASIC-resistance", but with the Scrypt ASICs this argument was gone.

So, some coins decided to kill themselves switching the algo (like Feathercoin, which migrated to NeoScrypt) or changing to proof-of-stake and insisting to claim about ASIC-resistance (like Pandacoin). Well, the rest should be irrelevant, who fucking cares after all.

Now the tendency is to clone Darkcoin and claiming to use a X30 algo and switching to pure proof-of-stake until it dies some months later.

Dogecoin top 3 or 5 (whichever way you want to look at)

There's interest in all sorts of coin clones.  Just take any litecoin spin-off known as "scrypt".  The point is how well the devs do of marketing the new coin and how it emerges as a useful coin.  Doge was successful because of all the charitable outcomes and enthusiastic fans.  It's really about the capability of the sales team.