Thanks everyone for the comments and the advice.
With bitcoin 2017 fork behind us, is NOW the right time to fork off the bitcoin core and make a clone alt coin?
In this alt coin, I am planning to separate mining from transaction verification: the block validation works same way as in bitcoin, except that no new coins will be awarded for the legacy 'mining', the only income of the old miner is the transaction fee of the block.
The actual mining will be moved into a mining block, whereby 50 coins will be awarded to those who mine the block by identifying a new molecular structure for this particular block. Just now sure how viable this process will be...