This whole alt-coin thing is just a passing fad. I recently cashed out all my BitCoins and put the money into Beanie Baby Collectables. They're these cool stuffed toys that everybody is collecting these days. I was able to get a bunch of them at a very reasonable price range. Their value is bound to skyrocket in the future as more and more people get into it.

And you can print your own money by writing "This is 100 dollars bill" and sending it to printer multiple times.

The only remaining task is to convince others to use it :)

Thanks for building this, and welcome to HN BlueMatt! If you can edit the headline, you might want to prefix with 'Show HN'.

I'm curious what does the altcoin use for peer discovery? Do you get code for a DNS seed too?

There was an interesting discussion on bitcoin-dev mailing list the last couple days about whether it makes sense to enable merge-mining on new altcoins. It's far from settled, but it's another idea for a feature you would want to toggle.... Also the scrypt difficulty parameters! OK, at some point this is just 'cheating', right? :-)

BTW, I think if you know Bitcoin enough to want to create an altcoin, you would trust Matt Corallo / BlueMatt enough to know your 0.01 BTC is safe.

EDIT: Wow, look at them go: http://coingen.io/status.html

Who runs the nodes for bootstrap?

If the server that runs this is US based and they allow trademarks through, you'll get a C&D within a week. Lawyers make their money googling for this stuff.

All someone has to do is register "paypal" or "amazon" or "exxon" etc. and the fun will be over shortly.

Creator might want to take their name and home address off the domain registration.

I don't want to get picky, but wouldn't cloning litecoin be objectively superior? Cloning bitcoin just leaves your currency to the ASICS from the get go, at least with scrypt, everybody has a decent shot at mining early.

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Having read the site, I noted scrypt was an option.

It should really be the default.

Otherwise Great work, this is really cool!

If the Internet has taught me anything it's that the next form of currency will be cats. You can take pictures of them, add words in impact font, or take videos of them. You then generate tons of money somehow when you mother shares them in a forwarded email (I think).

I have therefore started mining cats. Turns out when you put 30 of them in a room they generate more 'interest' than the best Bitcoin mining outfits.

Why there is not a bcrypt option for Proof of Work Algorithm? (Technical question: There are a lot of AltCoins out there. Why no one proposed a AltCoin where the Proof of Work Algorithm is based in bcrypt?)

I'm not sure if this is a parody.

Surely this is useful though, despite others claims it is a parody?

Can this be used to create a distributed transaction system for some arbitrary application? E.g. create a massively multilayer game with its own underlying transaction safe economy.

I thought the block chain was useful in itself, forgetting about the currency implications. Its a good data structure. Cloning it seems mega useful for putting it to work elsewhere..

Every person on this planet should have her own currency.

Perhaps related to this? http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/12/how...

This is a great segue for the "pump and dump" scheme. Essentially you can create your own coin and mine it with your buddies. Then create a mini exchange for the coin and target the older, less tech savvy people - who won't be able to tell the difference between Bitcoins and a more obfuscated virtual currency. Basically you'll accumulate the virtual coins for free and sell them off for a profit. Maybe I'm missing something but it feels like all the ingredients are present.

Ten confirmations in, my coin still isn't showing up. I guess the site's overwhelmed, but I wouldn't recommend others spend any money until the backlog's cleared.

I was thinking about this the other day, that people will start making their own crypto currencies, trying to cash in on a new currency and have it work out like it did for the early adopters of BTC. These currencies will be very volatile, but all of them will become part of a new Forex landscape. If you think there's a lot of speculators now working with bitcoin, wait until people start trying to play arbitrage with different crypto currencies. The new Wild West...

I believe this emphatically proves the point that cryptocurrencies are not at all different from Chuck E. Cheese tokens.

I was going to do this too[https://twitter.com/xyzgra/status/408947104455745536]. Oh well. Congrats.

I just created Hackernews Coin. They give you a website link that you need to refresh. Now, I need to wait...

It's awesome how the crypto-currency ecosystem becomes harder and harder to kill with hacks like this.

Funny idea, but why trust these binaries not to mine for the author?

My guess is, in long term bitcoin price will fall. Eventually multiple services will add other currencies next to bitcoin.

This is one of the stupidest things I've ever seen. I can't even begin to explain...

Where's the API ?

hackernewscoin?

I knew it was just a matter of time before someone made this. Nice!

Maybe a good feature would be to generate an html homepage for the coin, as well as a forum post for the alt coins section in Bitcointalk. Also a coin icon generator.

Lastly, perhaps charge the fee after the person can see it's all there.