Altcoin

An "altcoin" is any cryptocurrency that isn't Bitcoin. The term covers everything from genuinely novel research projects (Monero, for privacy) to forks of Bitcoin with minor changes (Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash) to pure marketing exercises with no technical substance (most of the long tail).

This site is Bitcoin-only. That's a deliberate editorial choice, not a slight against curiosity. The reasons we don't cover altcoins:

• Bitcoin's monetary properties are different in kind, not degree. A fixed-supply, permissionless, neutral, miner-secured base layer is the thing every alternative is implicitly competing with. Most of them either drop one of those properties (centralized issuance, mutable supply, controlled validator sets) or never had it. The exceptions are interesting; the bulk aren't.
• Most altcoins are venture-funded equity in disguise. Founders hold large pre-mine allocations. Token launches are often closer to an IPO than to a monetary innovation. The economic model rewards insiders first. The worst version of the pattern - founders dumping pre-mined supply onto the public after launch - is the canonical rug pull, repeated cyclically across DeFi, Solana memecoins, and any platform where issuing a new token is cheap.
• Adoption time is finite. Spending time learning Bitcoin deeply pays compounding dividends. Spending it cycling through altcoins doesn't.

What we will acknowledge:

• Some altcoin engineering is genuinely novel. Monero's ring signatures, Ethereum's smart-contract platform, Zcash's zk-SNARKs - these advanced the cryptographic state of the art. Bitcoin has borrowed from this research where it made sense and would degrade Bitcoin's properties least (Schnorr signatures, MAST).
• The "altcoin" label is doing work. Many things sold as "crypto" don't claim to be alternative money; they're vehicles for speculation, governance experiments, or distributed-computing markets. Calling them altcoins lumps them with monetary alternatives they're not actually competing in.

The bridges that connect BTC to altcoin chains - Bitcoin bridges, wrapped BTC, custodial peg-ins - inherit those chains' trust assumptions and attack surfaces. BTC on Bitcoin is BTC. BTC on Ethereum is an IOU.

If you're learning Bitcoin and considering whether to broaden into altcoins: the honest answer is "later, if at all, and only after you've understood why Bitcoin's properties are hard to replicate." Most people who broaden too early end up with smaller stacks of everything.