5 best altcoins to mine in 2018

The rise of bitcoin in 2017 was unlike any of the previous years.  Bitcoin started the trends and is still on the top. however, having heard about the difficulty of mining bitcoin at this stage if you are a mining enthusiast you should probably look at the best altcoins to mine in 2018.

Altcoin or alternative coins which were launched after the success of bitcoins and are next best thing to bitcoin. Although there are hundreds of them I have selected few of those show real promise with their blockchain vastly improved and upgraded over bitcoin very own.

Altcoins are a significant part of the cryptocurrency landscape. However, they are not for everyone and people often have many questions. This post will provide a brief overview of the best list of altcoins to mine in 2018.

1) Litecoin (LTC)

Litecoin is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency and open source software project released under the MIT/X11 license. Creation and transfer of coins are based on an open source cryptographic protocol and is not managed by any central authority. it was launched in the year 2011, about 3 years after the launch of bitcoin.’ It was created by Charlie Lee, a MIT graduate, and former Google engineer. Altcoin has a faster block generation rate than other currencies and hence offers a faster transaction confirmation.The number of consumers for Litecoin, developers and merchants alike are also steadily increasing. The price of Litecoin at the beginning of the year 2017 was around $4 which has increased to  $243.63 by the time I wrote this post.

2) Ethereum (ETH)

Ethereum is another popular cryptocurrency launched in 2015. Ethereum is an open-source, public, blockchain-based distributed computing platform featuring smart contract (scripting) functionality. 

Ethereum also provides a cryptocurrency token called "ether", which can be transferred between accounts and used to compensate participant nodes for computations performed. 

Since 2016, Ethereum was split into Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC). Ethereum Classic has a market capitalization of $2.8 billion and Ethereum (ETH) has a market capitalization of $41.4 billion, second after Bitcoin among all cryptocurrencies. Price of Ethereum classic has increased from $2 in early 2017 to $28 by the end of the year. Simultaneously, Ethereum price increased from $8 in early 2017 to $712 by the end of the year.

3) Zcash (ZEC)

Zcash is probably the newest in the market among other candidates in the list. nevertheless, it looks promising. It was Launched in the latter part of 2016. it is  A decentralized and open-source cryptocurrency that provides strong privacy protections. Shielded transactions hide the sender, recipient, and value on the blockchain. If Bitcoin is like http for money, Zcash is https—a secure transport layer, this is how Zcash identifies itself in the market.

Zcash offers privacy and selective transparency of transactions. Zcash offers its users the choice of ‘shielded’ transactions, which allow for content to be encrypted using an advanced cryptographic technique or zero-knowledge proof construction called a zk-SNARK developed by its team. Zcash has a market capitalization of $1.5 billion and currently has a price of $525 in the coin market.

4) Dash

This cryptocurrency was created and developed by Evan Duffield and can be mined using a CPU or GPU. it was Launched in January 2014 and was originally known as Darkcoin.In March 2015, ‘Darkcoin’ was rebranded to Dash, which stands for Digital Cash and operates under the ticker – DASH. Dash is a more secretive version of Bitcoin. Dash offers more anonymity as it works on a decentralized master code network that makes transactions almost untraceable. Dashcoin has a market capitalization of $707,976 USD and currently priced at $0.04 USD.

5) Monero (XMR)

Monero is an open-source cryptocurrency created in April 2014 that focuses on privacy, decentralization, and scalability that runs on Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, and FreeBSD( Wikipedia). This open-source cryptocurrency was launched in April 2014 and soon spiked great interest among the cryptography community and enthusiasts. The development of this cryptocurrency is completely donation-based and community-driven. 

Monero has been launched with a strong focus on decentralization and scalability, and enables complete privacy by using a special technique called ‘ring signatures.’ With this technique, there appears a group of cryptographic signatures including at least one real participant – but since they all appear valid, the real one cannot be isolated. Monero has a market capitalization of $5 billion and price of Monero has increased from $13 in early 2017 to  $352.57 by the end of the year.

Bitcoin continues to lead the pack of cryptocurrencies, in terms of market capitalization, user base, and popularity. However, these altcoins that have made to the list are gaining popularity and going by the current trend, they are here to stay. Either for the purpose of profitable mining or investing these altcoins are the one you should focus on.

If you have any question feel free to leave a comment.

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