Behold Arscoin, our own custom cryptocurrency!

Aurich Lawson

Recently, I became the first person in the history of Ars Technica to have a goldrather than blackuser name.

How did I get this blinged-out honor? I bought it for the low, low price of 500 Arscoinsthe latest digital cryptocurrency to hit the Internet. Arscoin is one of around 100 or so "altcoins," or alternative bitcoins, derived from the same source code as the original cryptocurrency.

Everything you need to know to mine Arscoins with your CPU or GPU.

But other altcoin creators are true believers in anarcho-capitalism, or they simply find Bitcoin and its derivatives new and interesting. And not all altcoins are quite as ridiculous as they may seem; even Dogecoin, which was jokingly based on an image meme, has an on-paper market capitalization of more than $60 million.

As the new year began, I found myself writing about several new (and often ridiculous) altcoins:Coinye,Norris Coin, and yes,Koindashian. It got me thinking: if anyone can just up and create a new altcoin, how hard can it be? Arscoin is our attempt to find out. Here's how we created our own digital currency, how you can do it too, and what it all means.

The Arscoin project is for those who want to experiment with digital currenciesand buy some fun hats and colored usernames along the way. In other words, it is foreducational use only; we have centralized the system in order to prevent it from developing into a real-money economy.

Jesuscoin and Snoochyboochy

While the creator of Bitcoin remains a mystery, the currency's digital underpinnings are not; its famously open source. One of its first major competitors, Litecoin, used the Bitcoin source code in late 2011, changing a few key parameters before releasing its own source code. That, in turn, has spawned more recent clones like BBQCoin, Dogecoin, and Namecoin. According to Coinmarketcap.com, 75 mineable altcoins currently exist, with market capitalizations ranging from $38,000 (FedoraCoin) to $10.3 billion (Bitcoin). Even other journalists have started their own altcoins (see Joe Weisenthal's Stalwartbucks).

Go here to read the rest:
Behold Arscoin, our own custom cryptocurrency!