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Topic: Why have almost all altcoins so far been developed by private individuals? (Read 383 times)

legendary
Activity: 1610
Merit: 1183
Because the goverment doesn't make any money by doing altcoins. But make no mistake, they will create a way to run fiat throught crypto, and when this day comes Bitcoin will shine as the true alternative the government money.
sr. member
Activity: 310
Merit: 256
Photon --- The First Child Of Blake Coin --Merged
Actually the Blake Coin system was started by one individual with a whole load of input from countless people along the way.

We have an excellent core team who work together and others who are less central to the code of the coins that are working on other items including games that will be using the coins which go into beta testing soon..... so while your statement is generally correct , it is not correct across the board,  if you want other examples besides myself (Photon) and Blake Coin and the other 4 coins we merge mine , consider a team like the FeatherCoin team,  they have solid depth , are able to get things done when they need to and are in touch with the market,   certainly movers and shakers on all levels.... so hopefully these two examples show that there are a few stand out projects to the norm......
legendary
Activity: 1876
Merit: 1000
because mostly cryptos are a solution looking for a problem. not to mention most companies would rather avoid the legal hassles. pretty much all profits from alts is from being a pyramid scheme.

"The past three years have shown us that there is the potential for huge amounts of money to be made in the altcoin scene." you do know this is not what cryptos where meant to be about? in fact its meant to be the opposite; ie whats the point of being an alternative to the greedy bankers if we ourselves become the greedy bankers.
sr. member
Activity: 406
Merit: 250
... As opposed to large corporations and governments?

The past three years have shown us that there is the potential for huge amounts of money to be made in the altcoin scene. You would think that businesses would see the opportunity and capitalize on a chance to make enormous profits. And yet, virtually all of the successful altcoins so far (e.g. Litecoin, Dogecoin, NXT, NEM, etc.) have been developed by teams of private individuals and volunteers. Some altcoins such as Ripple and BitShares were created by actual companies (Ripple Labs and Invictus Innovations, respectively) but usually only smaller businesses have gone so far as to develop their own altcoins. Only Ripple significantly departs from this trend as they were also funded by Google.

Established businesses such as Microsoft and Google have teams of software experts and cryptographers that most in the altcoin scene can only dream about. If a single lone programmer can create something as profitable as NXT which went from a market cap of $10,000 to $100 million in the space of three months, surely a large company such as Microsoft can do the same?

The argument that cryptocurrencies are almost always community-based open source projects and are thus owned by the community rather than a single centralized entity doesn't hold because many many corporations have invested in open source projects in the past and any investment of development should translate to profits for anyone who holds the currency. For instance, Sun Microsystems developed OpenOffice.org before selling it to Oracle along with their other assets. Much of Java is also free and open source software. Many Linux distros are developed and distributed by for-profit companies who then offer support services and resources for enterprise consumers.

EDIT: I understand that Microsoft and IBM are working on blockchain technologies but so far, these have been purely research projects rather than attempts to develop an actual marketable product.
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