Over the 2017 Winter break, cryptocurrency hit the mainstream due in part to BTCitcoin reaching a valuation of over $10,000. This created quite a buzz in many tech communities, hacker hangouts, and popular media outlets. Personally, I had always had an interest in creating my own cryptocurrency mostly to earn the privilege of being a creator in the space. I knew that this process would bring me closer to understanding the underlying mechanisms of cryptocurrency in general, and allow me to view and understand the technology from it's operational perspective. You may have your own reasons, but like many other enthusiasts, I really just wanted to see how this stuff really works under the hood.

One of the initial issues and a key motivations for this very article has to do with the lack of information regarding cryptocurrency creation in general, especially when working with modern crytpocurrency codebases. Tutorials exist, although many focus on outdated versions of Bitcoin/Litecoin and often leave out vital information to successfully create an operational clone. Aside from source code, my success was mostly derived using pieces of information contained within the following resources:

Bear's "How to make an altcoin" blog post - http://dillingers.com/blog/2015/04/18/how-to-make-an-altcoin/
Shakezula's "How To Clone Scrypt Based Altcoins" guide - https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B82OOXRXzyeadFU2OVdaREk2Y00
Whatthefluxable's "Make Your Own Cryptocurrency" video series - https://www.youtube.com/user/whatthefluxable/feed

As mentioned in the title, we will be working with the latest Litecoin v0.15 release. You may wonder why would anyone want to create a cryptocurrency based on something that already exists? The reality is that "most" cryptocurrencies share at least some form of ancestry with something that came before it. Litecoin began as a fork of bitcoin and there will be many parallels drawn to this fact as we outline the processes for creating your own. Using this codebase as a starting point, we can ensure that we will start off with something at least as good as the origin, with plenty of pre-existing documentation to guide us along the way.

As a result of going through this journey myself, I was able to create my own operational cryptocurrency by the working name "faithcoin" http://faithco.in (Two days after the launch of faithcoin, someone created an ERC20 token by the same name and posted on bitcointalk, please do not confuse yourself with this 'coin' https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2664744.0). Personally, I created the coin to have something tangible in the cryptocurrency space that I can call my own. It does not really do anything different than the current Litecoin release, other than exist on a wholly different blockchain along with some rebranding and it's own block explorer @ http://blockchain.faithco.in. The contents of this guide will outline everything that I did to create faithcoin in the hope that you are able to use these learnings to create your own cryptocurrency.

For those wishing for a tl;dr; version of this tutorial, you may wish to peruse the Faithcoin commit history starting at commit hash BF2F486 @ https://github.com/toolboc/faithcoin/commits/master

Anyways, here is the full tutorial on "How to Make a Cryptocurrency Using Litecoin v0.15 Source" on Hackster.io. I hope this guide proves useful to fellow enthusiasts who are looking to create something of their own on this forum:
https://www.hackster.io/pjdecarlo/how-to-make-a-cryptocurrency-using-litecoin-v0-15-source-fb5e82

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