You need to mine a Genesis block. Here is a thread that should help.  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1030365.0

First thing to be aware of is that confirmation is unnecessary in many situations in bitcoin. In those situations, transactions can be considered to be nearly instant and confirmation time is unimportant.

Next thing to be aware of is that bitcoin provides orders of magnitude more security than any other decentralized crypto currency right now.

Finally, 10 minutes is a very short time to wait in those few situations where it isn't safe to accept an unconfirmed transaction.

Therefore, with immense security and short 10 minute confirmation times on average, it would seem that bitcoin provides the best compromise between time and level of security.

I assume you are talking about confirmation time not transaction time. Transaction time is commonly understood as the time it takes for the other party to know a transaction exists. Bitcoin does this in a matter of seconds, I doubt any alt is faster in that regard.

Confirmation time is something completly different. Its the time it takes for your transaction to be in a block. For bitcoin the average time for a new block is 10 minutes and IIRC the average time for the first confirmation is ~5-7 minutes. This varies of course and there are some alt coins out there that want to make you think their coin is better because their average time for the first block is e.g. 1 minute. Keep in mind though that less time between two blocks means also more work wasted, because it creates a higher chance for orphans. This will make the alt coin network less secure, because it would need more resources to offer the same level of security (to prevent a 51% attack). Besides that an alt coin is typically less secure because less people are invested into it and thus less overall hashing power is spent on the alt coins network.

To sum this up, yes you can lower the time between two blocks, but its a trade off with network security. For miners a higher time between blocks is preferable, because it lowers the risk of orphans and thus of wasted work (considering a PoW coin).

Hi.

Your questions are very debatable and this can simply start a flame war.
Best alt-coin? Hard to tell. Some are old, some have big fan base, some are anonymous. Some are bitcoin clones (with few or with big changes), some are built from scratch.
Some have big advertising (cough Dark/Dash cough..), some ... need more checking to be discovered. You'll have to do your own detective work and see which altcoins deserve your attention.

About problems: some claim anonymity and it's not sure that they actually provide it. Some can be mined by ASICs, some with GPU, some only CPU. Some are PoS (you only keep wallet open, no big resources for mining). Some are cheap IPO/ICO scame.

Afaik have blockchain, but for some you will not see that much info like for Bitcoin (like top100 richest wallets and the amounts in them). Mining can be done with hard work (PoW), only wallet open (PoS), by providing HDD space, ... maybe some others I don't know.

Some anonymous coins have a tough fight trying to be the anon alternative to bitcoin. Some just use TOR, some are college clones, some are just scam. Some are dead coins.


I will just tell the altcoins I like, for various reasons: XMR, DOGE, FIBRE, XMG. I will not tell that they are best. Time will tell if my choices were any good.


Good luck in your search!