Blockchain is part of our everyday life, specially here on STEEM, but how many of you still remembers the history of the first cryptocurrencies? Personally, I was very early exposed to Bitcoin mining with GPUs, I migrated to Litecoin once the BTC difficulty was skyrocketing after the first ASICs, and I mined several other altcoins before settling in with Gridcoin.
To give you an image of the early days, I compiled a timeline of the first ten cryptocurrencies created after Bitcoin. I added a short description about what was special with each of them, and I included the current market capitalisation.
| Currency | Release | MarketCap | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin | October 2008 | $60.5B | |
| Litecoin | October 2011 | $1.9B | First cryptocurrency to introduce Scrypt as a hashing algorithm designed to fight the aggressive expantion of the ASIC minners. |
| Namecoin | April 2011 | $10.0M | P2P network to build a decentralized DNS (domain name system). |
| Bytecoin | July 2012 | $107.8M | Ring signatures to mix different outputs of similar value into one transaction, making it nearly impossible to deduce the source of the money. |
| Peercoin | August 2012 | $12.3M | First cryptocurrency to use PoS to achieve distributed consensus. |
| Dogecoin | December 2013 | $227.5M | Cryptocurrency introduced as a "joke currency". |
| Feathercoin | April 2013 | $3.1M | |
| Gridcoin | October 2013 | $1.7M | Cryptocurrency introduced to reward "citizen science" on BOINC. |
| Primecoin | July 2013 | $3.9M | Cryptocurrency that implements a PoW that searches for chains of prime numbers. |
| Ripple | 2013 | $12.8B | Most popular payment system, designed for peer to peer debt transfer. |
| Nxt | September 2013 | $25.0M | Specifically conceived as a flexible platform to build applications and financial services. |
It's a pity that Gridcoin is the most undervalued coin in this list, as I still consider it to be a revolutionary cryptocurrency. The Gridcoin blockchain implements a right balance between the Proof-of-Research and Proof-of-Stake protocols to reward people that are contributing with their computational power to solve problems in areas as diverse as mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, environmental science, or astrophysics.
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Gridcoin is number 7? Wow, I never knew. That's pretty cool.
Yes, Gridcoin was one of the pioneers
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Ahhh, yes Peercoin! I wonder if people have been staking their Peercoin all these years!
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hi my steemian friend could you please place ethereum in all this. it was only launched in 2015 but was proposed in late 2013 by Vitalik Buterin, a cryptocurrency researcher and programmer. The system went live on 30 July 2015, with 72 million coins "premined".
I think it is the most important . Isn't right?
I believe Ethereum gets enough publicity these days... I'm aware about the 2013 proposal, but that was a period heavily loaded by all kind of proposals. If I'm not wrong, at that time Vitalik proposed to have a fork of the bitcoin and to implement the capabilities of having scripts built in the bitcoin blockchain
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proposed != production ready, I think it's fair to only count the launch order not the theorized order
Yes, this is also my view. Cemeteries are full of ideas that died before their implementation