Behold Arscoin, our own custom cryptocurrency!

Recently, I became the first person in the history of Ars Technica to have a gold—rather than black—user name.

How did I get this blinged-out honor? I bought it for the low, low price of 500 Arscoins—the latest digital cryptocurrency to hit the Internet. Arscoin is one of around 100 or so "altcoins," or alternative bitcoins, derived from the same source code as the original cryptocurrency.

The existing Bitcoin community has an inherent distrust of many altcoins. Bitcoin forums are replete with discussions of “pump and dump” scams, where the originators of a new altcoin might “pre-mine” coins, release their currency to the general public, and market their hot new cryptocurrency hard in order to drive the price up. Then the creators simply sell off their coins at a profit and walk away. It’s one of the oldest financial tricks in the book.

But other altcoin creators are true believers in anarcho-capitalism, or they simply find Bitcoin and its derivatives new and interesting. And not all altcoins are quite as ridiculous as they may seem; even Dogecoin, which was jokingly based on an image meme, has an on-paper market capitalization of more than $60 million.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/03/behold-arscoin-our-own-custom-cryptocurrency/

JoeCoin... I like the sound of that