Topic: Which altcoin is the least similar to bitcoin? (Read 277 times)

An old coin which was really very different from BTC - perhaps even more than Iota or Obyte/Byteball - was Timekoin (Github here), a PHP-based coin which is now probably dead, but I heavily doubt that the consensus model really was a "sound" model.

One could describe it as a kind of hybrid between an "obfuscated" Proof of Work system, in which the nodes competed for a "slot" to be able to mine, a Proof of "activity" system (there were multiple block rewards per block, distributed between all nodes with a slot which were continuously online for the last hours/days, and nodes that were offline several times were excluded) and a limitation of one node per IP address.

One of the more strange features was that old blockchain parts were hashed and distributed as "transaction foundations" (a kind of "macro-blocks", I think they consisted of 4096 blocks every one) to achieve additional security against a "51% long range attack" where large parts of the blockchain were faked, so it wasn't a traditional blockchain where all blocks are independent. That sounded good back then for me when I was new to blockchains, but now I think this measure should have limited effects on security. At least, it has the same problem than "decentralized checkpoints" in PoS coins (if there are different "foundations" in competition, then the network could get fragmented).

Monero is similar to Bitcoin other than the increased amount of privacy options however at its core it uses similar features and ways of processing transactions. Coins based on the DAO technology would be my least like Bitcoin because as crypthough said it is not based on the Blockchain.

MimbeWimbleCoin aka MWC - https://www.mwc.mw/mimblewimble-coin-whitepaper

Well, among the well known ones Litecoin is a fork of Bitcon, so that one is very similar. They only changed the algo to mine it and some other parameters.

Ethereum is a little bit different in that it uses a different kind of address system. It is still mineable, still has a blockchain, yet was not designed to scale when it was first created. It's possible there will be a second iteration of this altcoin.

And then of course there are those 2 second block time chains like EOS and BitShares that run completely on Delegated Proof of Stake, that have a more or less fixed number of block producers voted by everyone else.

I still have to check Monero "under the hood" but I think the similarities are more than you think.

That is also what I was thinking. Is there any coin in particular that you think is more interesting than others? Also do you have any links to their documentation?

IOTA or other DAG coins because there aren't based on blockchain technology  . IOTA for example is based on Directed Acyclic Graph or simplified a tangle.  But if you are only looking at blockchain technology, then every coin with a complete other use case like Cardano is quite different. You can distinguish the programming language for example. But the technology itself is often very similar because of the fact it's based on blockchain.

Monero [Cryptonote]

Considering the code and implementation of the blockchain technology, which altcoin do you think has the most differences compared to bitcoin? Please explain these differences and include a link to the "documentation" of the coin if possible. I'll try to research the coin and reply back with my findings.

Things I don't exactly consider as differences: Using different hash function, mining algorithm, asymmetric cryptography (different curve, different signature scheme), and obviously: different supply, block time, block size,...