How To Create Your Own Cryptocurrency

When you look at the complexities that go into making a physical dollar bill its plain to see why most people dont start trying to print a new form of currency every day, but making a new digital currency is surprisingly easy for someone with even basic coding skills. But coding isnt the only step to getting your digital currency off the ground. Here are the five steps you should follow according to the makers of three cryptocurrencies.

When you think about creating a new digital currency it's easy to assume the first step would be to begin coding your coin, but thats the wrong place to start, according to Chris Ellis, a London entrepreneur and a community activist at Feathercoin.

The first step is to find a community and build a currency around them rather than building a currency and expecting everyone to show up, Ellis says. It has to be sensitive to their needs and be relevant to their cultural heritage and background.

Feathercoin was created by Peter Bushnell in April 2013. Bushnell left his job as head of IT at Oxford Universitys Brasenose College because he wanted to start his own currency that put people at the center. This was in response to what he saw as a lack of community involvement and inclusiveness by the existing cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, on the popular cryptocurrency site bitcointalk.org.

Though he had not met Bushnell at the time, Ellis, who had been actively promoting and educating people on cryptocurrencies since last March, shared the sense of alienation and seclusion found on Bitcoin forums.

These forums were very tech focused and not very welcoming to newcomers or minority groups which are often served better by smaller teams, Ellis says. The forums did not make it easy for people to get involved in the development of the coin. Many people on these forums take a backseat and speculate on the price rather than actively getting involved.

Ellis found the cryptocurrency community activism he was looking for in Feathercoin, whose technical development he says benefits greatly from its community activism approach.

For Feathercoin we were a group of crypto enthusiasts, some of whom were new to the scene but who felt shut out from the rest of the space, Ellis says. Everyone at Feathercoin feels its important to demonstrate how a devoted group of people can establish a stable currency, he says. By working together a community of dedicated crypto enthusiasts are much better able to find and address vulnerabilities and security threats, like the 51% attack, which the community of coders at Feathercoin have successfully built protections against.

Building such protections and nurturing the development of your currency give your coin legitimacy and trust in the eyes of the public, something that is hard to do if those involved in the currency are passive spectators looking out for their own interests.

Surprisingly, every single currency developer I spoke with said the same thing: Coding your cryptocurrency is usually the least time-intensive part of the process. Thats because virtually every cryptocurrency on the market today is based on the open source code of Bitcoin or Litecoin that is available on GitHub.

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How To Create Your Own Cryptocurrency