I decided to create my own cryptocurrency so… introducing alichtcoin!
There’s so much going on in the Bitcoin world — more specifically the Blockchain — that it seems that just about every day a new cryptocurrency pops up. Everyone’s heard of Bitcoin, but did you know there are actually over 1000 different cryptocurrencies? Most of these are iterations on the original Bitcoin or built on top of Ethereum, while a few others have created an entirely new blockchain. With all of these new cryptocurrencies, I was curious to see how difficult it would be to create a new cryptocurrency.
Shockingly, its not too difficult. So much so that I decided to go about the process of creating my own cryptocurrency and… introducing alichtcoin! DISCLAIMER: Forget about it being a viable currency or if it has any value whatsoever, or if anyone will actually use it (haha!) — this blogpost will just cover the process of how to create one’s own cryptocurrency.
Getting started…
At first glance, creating a new cryptocurrency sounds like a crazy idea. That is, until you realize that the entire concept of cryptocurrency is that it’s open-source and available to anyone — the BitCoin and Ethereum repos are publicly available on GitHub — which shows that the original intention from the outset was to be able to tinker and modify with these currencies. With this in mind I was ready to begin!
Deciding which service to use as a guide
I wasn’t going to create a new currency from scratch, so my initial decision was which service to use as a guiding resource. There are many useful online resources that can guide you in creating your own cryptocurrency, but after googling I settled on a website called Proof after viewing a helpful YouTube video where they outlined the process.
Step 1 — Creating the new currency
The first thing I had to do was create an account on Proof’s website. Then I went to beta.proofdashboard.com and selected “create new asset.”
Creating the token, issuing shares
After creating a new asset, I was prompted to select “community currency” which enabled me to set the number of shares I wished to issue and at what initial price I wanted to set my cryptocurrency. I chose to issue a million coins at the initial price of $1 a coin. After setting the price and number of shares, the next step was to make it a “public asset” before getting it ready to put on the market.
Pick which blockchain you want to issue it on
Now that I had set the price and number of coins I wanted to issue, my next choice was deciding which blockchain to put it on — Ethereum’s or Proof’s. Each one has its own benefits. Ethereum is virtually universal, uses the regular Ethereum token standard, and allows your currency to be seen on cryptocurrency public markets. Proof isn’t as popular so the downside of deploying to Proof is that it won’t be listed on an exchange. However deploying to Proof’s blockchain is free, and since I initially just wanted to create a basic prototype of my cryptocurrency I decided to go that route.
Deploying to the blockchain
I hit create and deployed to the Proof blockchain… and voila! alichtcoin was created!
… and that’s how I created my own cryptocurrency.
Now alichtcoin may be worth about as much as Monopoly money, but I accomplished my main goal which was to find out out firsthand how easy it is to create one’s own cryptocurrency.
