I don't want to make my own currency, at least not yet. I'm just wanting to take the first step in learning how to. I've already learnt quite a bit about cryptography and its implementation. I did my undergrad in IT Sec, so that was a help.
There are several teams I'm following at the moment, so I'll try and contribute to some of them. Thanks for the tips!
How far have you managed to get? Even the ScroogeCoin assignment for the cryptocurrency course (@coursera offered by Princeton) wasn't very straightforward. Then again I had more difficulty with Java than anything else. Haven't done anything serious with Java for 7 years now.
I'm even willing to put some BTC towards an alt-coin demo. If it documents well, and explains differences (e.g. between this abc-coin and Litecoin from which it was forked) then all the better.
Yeah I couldn't do the ScroogeCoin assignment. Spent about 25 minutes trying to work out exactly what I needed to do but couldn't work it out. I'll likely go back to it in a few weeks and try again. That course is a pretty good introduction though. I've made some Youtube tutorials on other topics before, so I was planning on making some on developing cryptos once I get my head around it all and start developing.
Possibly the best 'intro' to blockchain programming article I found was
http://blockxchain.org/2017/06/04/building-a-blockchain-with-python-1/ about building a basic blockchain with Python. Inspired by a similar article using Javascript
https://medium.com/@lhartikk/a-blockchain-in-200-lines-of-code-963cc1cc0e54.
They're still only really simple examples, so I'm going to try fill out the Python one and make it more complex. If I get proficient enough I'll make some Youtube tutorials. A group I follow implemented their first testnet version entirely in Python, so I feel like that will be a good resource for me.
If you're wanting some more information on making Litecoin clones these tutorials might be of use to you
https://www.youtube.com/user/whatthefluxable. But I'm more trying to build it from scratch to try and understand it as much as I can, not just make a clone of an existing coin.
I do feel like there isn't enough information out there to help developers get over the initial hurdle for starting blockchain development. Or at least it's not all easily accessible.
Feel free to message me if you get much further with this. I'd like to get in contact with some other new developers and maybe share what resources they're using.