Building Your Own Cryptocurrency

In the previous chapter, you learned about major concepts behind Bitcoin by building a payment system based on the Bitcoin payment protocol. Alongside this, you took earlier advantage of projects such as Rootstock to enable advanced smart contract capabilities. However, there is no better way to cement and deepen your understanding of the blockchain than to build your own cryptocurrency. Although building a currency from scratch is beyond the scope of this book, you will examine instead how to build your own cryptocurrency based on the existing Bitcoin code base.

In this chapter, we'll cover the basic concepts necessary to build an alternative cryptocurrency (known as an altcoin) that offers almost all the functionalities of Bitcoin, which we will call Readercoin. I don't expect the reader to have strong programming skills, or any deep knowledge of Bitcoin's details. Consequently I present herein a simplified guide to help anyone to customize Bitcoin and create a new clone—a new cryptocurrency.

This chapter is broken into two main parts:

• Compiling the Bitcoin code
• Designing and building Readercoin

By the end of this two-part guide, you should be able, among other things, to clone Bitcoin and build and mine your new currency.