At the moment, we can see that there are a lot of coins starting to emerge now, but in fact today, it seems that almost all of the coins have started to be valuable right now, but we can see that all the other crypto coins currently depend on the price of bitcoin, so now we can exchange to buy altcoins using bitcoin in a short time so that it costs less.
This is about regardless of the point that for which thing , OP asked .
Well already many of the guys here told about the difference between bitcoin and altcoin but here I don't think the most of the people explained him in best way to identify the bitcoin and altcoin in simple manner , I mean to define .
The first coin that entered in the online world of internet is bitcoin and after that all the coins which entered in this field of the cryptocurrency are altcoin ,
ALTCOIN = ALTERNATE + COIN , so other than bitcoin are all altcoins .
thought that Bitcoin are two different cryptocurrency, but it turns out that it altcoin is also bitcoin and the only difference is it is modified.
Your thinking about exact that there are few coins also which are just copy of the technology of the bitcoin Blockchain algorithm for example lite coin having the same technology SHA256 that bitcoin have and also there are many coins which have the same type of technology but it is the bitcoin which is more better and more stable in the cryptocurrency market and another are just representative to show that they can do something like bitcoin but in actual they are not able to do the same impact in the cryptocurrency like bitcoin is doing .