Following on from the “Why DigiByte” article, many people have been curious about how it stacks up against a bunch of other Cryptocurrencies.
This is a fantastic opportunity to objectively weigh up a whole lot of facets of Altcoins in general and compare them with DigiByte. There won’t be a lot of pictures, but hopefully there will be enough references to source material to lend credibility to all claims / statistics.
Let’s pick a few popular coins to compare:
- Bitcoin
- Litecoin
- Ethereum
- ZCash
- Ripple
- Monero
- Bitshares
- IOTA
- and of course, DigiByte
Should be enough of a list!
We’ll compare them each, on a number of criteria, namely:
- Initial launch details / fairness / beneficiaries
- Distribution of mining / staking
- Blockchain speed + fees
- Hashing Algorithms / Blockchain security
- Controversies around the coin
- Major milestones since launch
- Additional coin features / uniqueness
- Real world use cases
- And there’s bound to be more added over time
The plan is to review each, per coin, and not “grade” the results (Say, out of 10) but rather to present the facts to you, reading this, and allow you to make up your own mind regarding what you believe to be worthwhile and how DigiByte in particular stacks up in each area vs a bunch of other Cryptocurrencies.
Let’s start at the beginning:
Initial launch details / fairness / beneficiaries
| Bitcoin | Launched Jan 2009, first of it’s kind Maximum of 21 million Bitcoin, estimated last mint in 2140 No pre-mine No controversy Founder Satoshi Nakamoto is otherwise anonymous / used an alias |
| Litecoin | Launched Oct 2011 as a Bitcoin clone that was specifically for CPUs, with faster block times and higher coin numbers Maximum of 81 million Litecoin, estimated last mint in 2151 No pre-mine (2 blocks) No controversyFounded by Charlie Lee |
| Ethereum | Launched July 2015 as a scripting blockchain / platform for other products to be built on top of 72 million pre-mined for IPO, no hard-limit, though will likely not exceed 100 million coinsMinor to moderate controversy around the large Bitcoin -> Ether prior to launch Founded by Vitalik Buterin |
| ZCash | Launched October 2016 as an optionally anonymous cryptocurrency No pre-mine, however 10% of the first 4 years of mining goes to the ZCash company / Foundation as a ‘Founders reward’ Moderate controversy around the launch price crash, along with the ongoing rewards to Founders Founded by Zooko Wilcox |
| Ripple | Launched 2012 100% pre-mined, 20% kept by creators, 80% given to Ripple Labs to distribute Moderate controversy over large amount retained by creators, along with their speculation around how it may impact long-term price Founded by Ryan Fugger |
| Monero | More details needed |
| Bitshares | More details needed |
| IOTA | More details needed |
| DigiByte | Launched Jan 2014 by Jared Tate 0.25% premine given away to encourage early adoption 0.25% premine to support paid development of early features in the first 18 months. Wallet details disclosed publicly. |
Distribution of mining / staking
| Bitcoin | 80% of all Hash Power comes from China due to an ASIC monopoly |
| Litecoin | 65% of all Hash Power comes from China due to an ASIC monopoly |
| Ethereum | Relatively even distribution, nowhere near 51% attack possibility |
| ZCash | Flypool showing 60% Hash Power for previous month (Nov 2017) Very real possibility of 51% attack |
| Ripple | No mining, coins created centrally up-front. Validated by 25 validator nodes Any newly created coins would be made by central Ripple company |
| Monero | Relatively even distribution, nowhere near 51% attack possibility |
| Bitshares | Centralized PoS, 17 primary witnesses who do all the ‘work’ |
| IOTA | No “mining” in the proof-of-work sense Wallets verify transactions of others when submitting their own |
| DigiByte | Mining evenly distributed between 5 algorithms, each contribute 20% 51% attack would require 93% of primary algo and 51% of remaining 4 |
Blockchain speed + fees
| Bitcoin | 10 minute block timing, 1MB blocks Average tx is approx 500-600 bytes |
| Litecoin | 2.5 minute block timing, 2MB blocks Average tx is approx 500-600 bytes |
| Ethereum | Approx 17 seconds, no blocksize limit Note: Currently approx 10-15KB ea (Late 2017) |
| ZCash | 2.5 minute block timing, 2MB blocks |
| Ripple | Approx 4 second “Ledger close time” Approx USD$0.000015 per transaction |
| Monero | details |
| Bitshares | 3 second block timing, configurable by blockchain Variable maximum block size (Changes voted on), tested to 1GB Average tx is 100 bytes |
| IOTA | details |
| DigiByte | 15 second block timing, block size increasing, currently 2MB Approx USD$0.0003 per transaction |
Hashing Algorithms / Blockchain security
| Bitcoin | SHA256, ASIC mineable |
| Litecoin | Scrypt, ASIC mineable |
| Ethereum | Ethash, GPU mineable |
| ZCash | Equihash, GPU mineable |
| Ripple | No mining, centralized validation |
| Monero | CryptoNight mining, GPU mineable |
| Bitshares | No mining, centralized PoS |
| IOTA | No mining, distributed validation of other users transactions |
| DigiByte | SHA256, SCrypt, Groestl, Skein & Qubit, ASIC or GPU mineable |
Controversies around the coin
| Bitcoin | Details coming |
| Litecoin | Details coming |
| Ethereum | Details coming |
| ZCash | Details coming |
| Ripple | Details coming |
| Monero | Details coming |
| Bitshares | Details coming |
| IOTA | Details coming |
| DigiByte | Details coming |
Major milestones since launch
| Bitcoin | Details coming |
| Litecoin | Details coming |
| Ethereum | Details coming |
| ZCash | Details coming |
| Ripple | Details coming |
| Monero | Details coming |
| Bitshares | Details coming |
| IOTA | Details coming |
| DigiByte | Details coming |
Additional coin features / uniqueness
| Bitcoin | Details coming |
| Litecoin | Details coming |
| Ethereum | Details coming |
| ZCash | Details coming |
| Ripple | Details coming |
| Monero | Details coming |
| Bitshares | Details coming |
| IOTA | Details coming |
| DigiByte | Details coming |
Real world use cases
| Bitcoin | Details coming |
| Litecoin | Details coming |
| Ethereum | Details coming |
| ZCash | Details coming |
| Ripple | Details coming |
| Monero | Details coming |
| Bitshares | Details coming |
| IOTA | Details coming |
| DigiByte | Details coming |
More being added (Check back soon)