Following the success of Bitcoin, more and more substitutes of this cryptocurrency started to appear, known under the name of “Altcoins”. At the present time, there are more than 4,000 altcoins available to investors and this could make it harder for people to decide which is the best alternative to Bitcoin. That’s exactly why we came up with a list of four best such options that you can choose from, depending on your needs. In order to make sure that you select the best option, you first need to be aware of what kind of features you are looking for in your cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin Cash
This altcoin is quite similar to Bitcoin from many points of view, with a major difference in the size of the blocks, as Bitcoin had a 1MB block size, while Bitcoin Cash (BCH) had 8MB blocks. This year in May, the size of BCH’s blocks was expanded one more time and it is now 32MB. BCH joined the market in 2017 on 1st of August and it was the first Bitcoin hard fork to appear.
At the moment, BCH is the cryptocurrency that is the most broadly recognized by vendors and when it comes to market capitalization, Bitcoin Cash remained in the top 5 cryptocurrencies ever since it came into the market. These days, several crypto investors believe that BCH is one of the best Bitcoin alternatives.
Ethereum
Ethereum appeared on the market in 2015, being the first cryptocurrency to provide smart contracts, which are self-initiated protocols that reside on the blockchain. Even though these contracts are normal these days, it wasn’t always like this in the past. Because it introduced smart contract capabilities, this altcoin was actually the first second-generation cryptocurrency.
It seems that more and more analysts believe that Ethereum will someday manage to be superior to Bitcoin when it comes to market capitalization. One of the crypto professionals that is anticipating this change is Roger Ver, also known as Bitcoin Jesus.
There is another thing that Ethereum is taking the credit for and that is the present-day boom in Initial Coin Offerings (ICO). Currently, the ERC-20 token protocol of this altcoin is undoubtedly the most extensively used token creation platform. The funny thing is that the creators of ERC-20 initially produced this protocol only for intercompany use. However, once the executives of Ethereum realized that there is a great public demand for this kind of protocol, they made the decision to make it public. Ethereum is definitely one of the best alternatives to Bitcoin.
Stellar Lumens
This cryptocurrency entered the market in 2014, on July 31st, and the development team is run by Joyce Kim and Jed McCaleb. The main focus of Stellar Lumens is to create an open global financial network. Moreover, this altcoin is using credit anchors in order to make fund exchanges happen easier, without needing a third party approval.
Based on what we’ve seen recently, Stellar Lumens seems to have attracted some important partnerships with companies from all over the world, so we should expect a lot from this Bitcoin alternative in the future.
EOS
Dan Larimer, who is the founder of the project, has also co-founded Bitshares and Steemit, and the development team of EOS is Blockone. According to the developers, the EOS tokens can use the resources of the EOS platform, such as improved usability, scalability and flexibility, compared to previously created cryptocurrencies like Ethereum.
EOS is known for entering the market after it hosted an ICO that lasted for a year and which managed to raise more than four billion USD. Different from Bitcoin, EOS tokens do not perform any functions. The EOS platform is acting more like an operating system, which allows the execution and development, as well as the hosting of dApps – commercial-scale decentralized apps. A great advantage of EOS is that it has a Proof-of-Stake mining system and thus does not require that much computing power.
Henry Lares is still early into his career as tech reporter but has already had his work published in many major publications including Tech Crunch and the Huffington Post. In regards to academics, Henry earned an engineering degree from Apex Technical School. Henry has a passion for emerging technology and covers upcoming products and breakthroughs in science and tech.
