Forking a cryptocurrency?

[thirdprize]

What with gas prices i thought it might be useful to create a niche cryptocurrency for a particular market (the art market).  Literally fork the code for bitcoin (but probably ethereum) and just change the name (and any other bits).  What sort of hardare would you need to bring it online?  Assuming it is never going to be widely adopted, a couple of miners just to kick start it?  Fork an open source wallet.  I suppose the only trouble would be distributing the coin. If it stayed small artists and galleries could mine their own.

[1714553419]

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[1714553419]

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[mocacinno]

What kind of hardware? Last time i cloned a coin as a learning experience, i just installed 2 virtual machines on my laptop to serve as 2 nodes... That's about it...
In the beginning, the diff will be so low that you can easily cpu mine the first couple of blocks, and in order to compile the sourcecode you don't need an expensive machine, any recent desktop/laptop will probably do.

If you want to start an actual network, you might think about renting out 2 super cheap VPS's to serve as initial nodes... You can have a VPS to serve as a node for $5/month (or even less if you put you put a lot of effort into your search).

If you want a block explorer, a pool and a project website, you might want to throw in one or 2 extra VPS's (eventough those services could just aswell run on your 2 nodes).

Cloning a coin is not hard. Maintaining it, giving it value, creating a community and finding an actual pupose for your coin on the other hand are tough (i guess). Wouldn't it be better to use an existing project? Or if you really want your niche to have it's own "coin", maybe an ETH token will work aswell? Those contracts are readily available, setting up an ETH token costs (quite literally) a couple bucks, and you don't need to worry about pools, explorers and miners...

Just a last thing to think about: the current crypto ecosystem is completely flooded with crapcoins/tokens. It might be a good idear to find out if anybody is actually interested in such a project before you push the next coin/token online... Personally, things like ICO, IPO,... give me the shivers. It has a negative connotation in my mind.

[thirdprize]

Cloning a coin is not hard. Maintaining it, giving it value, creating a community and finding an actual pupose for your coin on the other hand are tough (i guess). Wouldn't it be better to use an existing project? Or if you really want your niche to have it's own "coin", maybe an ETH token will work aswell? Those contracts are readily available, setting up an ETH token costs (quite literally) a couple bucks, and you don't need to worry about pools, explorers and miners...

Just a last thing to think about: the current crypto ecosystem is completely flooded with crapcoins/tokens. It might be a good idear to find out if anybody is actually interested in such a project before you push the next coin/token online... Personally, things like ICO, IPO,... give me the shivers. It has a negative connotation in my mind.

Thanks.  Thought as much.  I'm in the #cryptoart scene and the reasons for having your own eth clone utility coin would be to
1) Not reinvent the wheel.  We already have a coin with smart contracts and all that stuff and that is good enough for me.  The contracts should be extremely comaptible.
2) At the moment it is all built around eth NFTs and smart contracts.  Unfortunately the eth gas price has literally killed the market.  $90 to execute a smart contract to sell a bit of art worth $40.  $50 to mint a piece of art.  It is just not worth it and as eth goes up so will the costs, so not having to deal with 99.99999% of the eth transactions will keep it cheaper and quicker.

The only downside would be having to get on an exchange or go the "local bitcoin" route for distributing it to the masses.  It wouldn't be a privacy coin so KYC is not an issue.  There wouldn't be any IPO/ICOs as most of those are just scams. 

Neo was the other one I looked at.  Quite well supported but not as popular.

[NeuroticFish]

Neo was the other one I looked at.  Quite well supported but not as popular.

Keep in mind that if you launch a new coin/platform it won't get popular just because you want so; it will probably ever be less popular than the currently known platforms.
Hence I suggest you better take a look to ETH competitors. Afaik also WAVES allows smart contracts. And with some more research you can make yourself a list of platforms to choose from.

All in all, creating a coin or a token only for a certain niche may not be useful at all and would have bigger chance for a failure than using something already existing and more-or-less established.

[mocacinno]

I'm kind of speaking outside of my comfort zone here, cause i know little about ETH... But i did start my own ETH network a long long time ago for testing purposes.
IIRC, it was basically just downloading ETH's binary, adapting some parameters and start mining the new genesis block... You basically had to do 0 changes in the sourcecode, just adapt some parameters and: voila, an ETH clone That's why ETH has several testnets, compared to BTC clones which only have one...

This is just from memory tough, but i just mean it's possible you can clone ETH without editing a single line in the sourcecode, which would make your enterprise more feasible.

Still, NeuroticFish gives a warning similar to mine: even a wellmade coin with distinct features is destined to fail if there is no real usecase, no real usebase, no services and no maintenance...

[thirdprize]

I'm kind of speaking outside of my comfort zone here, cause i know little about ETH... But i did start my own ETH network a long long time ago for testing purposes.
IIRC, it was basically just downloading ETH's binary, adapting some parameters and start mining the new genesis block... You basically had to do 0 changes in the sourcecode, just adapt some parameters and: voila, an ETH clone That's why ETH has several testnets, compared to BTC clones which only have one...

This is just from memory tough, but i just mean it's possible you can clone ETH without editing a single line in the sourcecode, which would make your enterprise more feasible.

Still, NeuroticFish gives a warning similar to mine: even a wellmade coin with distinct features is destined to fail if there is no real usecase, no real usebase, no services and no maintenance...

Really it isn't a coin, it is a use case for blockchain and smart contracts.  Problem is I can't see how it would work without the coin part though. 

[Ucy]

Interesting.
The developers probably didn't anticipate the  high fee issue & its  consequences on the NFTs market & the Network in general. . Wish they used a unique model to bring down the fees rather than relying on old model that's based on old systems  which will likely be unsustainable for well decentralized system/network. 
Guess the high gas price is a main reason you are looking for alternative? What prevent fee from going that high on a new Blockchain if the underlying problem is fixed.
 By the way, I read somewhere (unverified source actually) that the gas fee issue will be fixed in few months time.

[keyscore44]

Marketing will probably be the hardest, which is building trust, community and adoption. There were already many forks and brand new coins built specifically for one industry. When it comes to the art industry, many of the coins are dead, but some are doing very well and have additional use, such as the 4ART token (identification of works of art same as fingerprints and saving to the blockchain). In the case like this, you would have to convince everyone that your coin is just better and that will be very difficult.

[criket]

Marketing will probably be the hardest, which is building trust, community and adoption. There were already many forks and brand new coins built specifically for one industry. When it comes to the art industry, many of the coins are dead, but some are doing very well and have additional use, such as the 4ART token (identification of works of art same as fingerprints and saving to the blockchain). In the case like this, you would have to convince everyone that your coin is just better and that will be very difficult.

convincing without a product would be difficult. what sales strategy can be done without a clear product? the market is no longer stupid to be interested in a project without a useful product. even when they are in the market and have a product but the exchange is not supportive they will not thrive.
It will take a while to find a really good project on the market. especially for a new project, as you say, marketing will take a long time to make proper planning. projects should avoid rushing to release platforms and exchanges if they haven't prepared a good plan. many projects die as soon as they hit the market.

[UnbrokenSnat]

If you're looking for a cheap to use coin like Bitcoin, consider using Snatcoin [SNAT], they are 1 sat, easy to mine and already has a small but growing community.

With forking a crypto yourself you will need at least intermediate programming knowledge, ongoing costs to keep the nodes up, and as people have said the growing the community part is one of the hardest parts as people do not like the idea of new coins normally.  People hate ICOs and pre-mines, so you'll always lose out to the bigger miners too with what coins you have.

Also a coin like Bitcoin works quite differently from Ethereum tokens.  So it might just be better to do smart contracts on a cheaper network that is similar, or even the Ethereum testnet.  Like /r/cryptocurrency moons are only on Ethereum testnet and they have value.

[hatshepsut93]

This isn't going to work. People around the world want to deal in US dollars, not Venezuela pesos or Zimbabwe dollars. Similarly, people in crypto space want to trade in top coins like BTC, ETH, USDT - not some shitcoins from the bottom of the list. Why would artists sell their work for a coins that can crash by 90% in 5 minutes or that can be hacked because a dev made some mistakes, or 51% attacked because there's so little hashrate?

[thirdprize]

This isn't going to work. People around the world want to deal in US dollars, not Venezuela pesos or Zimbabwe dollars. Similarly, people in crypto space want to trade in top coins like BTC, ETH, USDT - not some shitcoins from the bottom of the list. Why would artists sell their work for a coins that can crash by 90% in 5 minutes or that can be hacked because a dev made some mistakes, or 51% attacked because there's so little hashrate?

Honestly, they would pay cash or some other coin.  All I really want is to use the blockchain.  However to run a smart contract you need gas and to get gas you need coins or tokens.