Blocknet and Bitbay are, in the stringent sense, "just bitcoin base hacked a bit". The reason im averse to that is that these overwhelmingly can't transcend what bitcoin already does in any meaningful manner and you get grotesque supernode perversions like dash.

Don't throw ByteBall in that mix though. Byteball is perfectly fine and im quite fond of it (that's why its in honorable mentions), but it's not technically trustless cryptocurrency in satoshian sense. It's a web of trust DAG, semantically more related to Ripple. It's a notable difference from Iota, where each transaction carries PoW proof (you can reframe iota as bitcoin where each transaction has its own block, but you can't do that for BB).


Indeed. It may seem asinine at first, but hear me out: People don't write new implementations just because they like the additional work, but because its often imperative to innovate. The only exception to the rule I've encountered is Sia, which for some odd reason is written from scratch, yet is technically very uninspiring and could work just as well as a bitcoin or some other codebase fork. The opposite is things like Ethereum - it'd be far more effort trying to bend bitcoin into that, hence why it is separate codebase from scratch.

Of course there's silver lining to the black and white thinking, and certain forks have proven innovative for one reason or another, but usually tend to be just mere extension of the original. A canonical example of this is Namecoin. It had its utility back then, and it was well engineered and everything, and it made sense to just fork bitcoin to do this. But it wasn't certainly that revolutionary, in fact, you could run the same service on bitcoin's chain, too.

Not everything is sunshine in the "from scratch" space. Tendermint and Maid come to mind as a massive clusterfuck of naivete and poor understanding, but it could be just growing pains.

edit: clarify why iota is trustless and byteball isnt