Bitcoin Vies with New Cryptocurrencies as Coin of the Cyber Realm

At a bitcoin conference in Miami this January, Jeffrey Tucker, a laissez-faire economist and libertarian icon, made an unexpected observation. “There are people in this room who would think bitcoin is a little old-fashioned,” he quipped. Well, that was fast. After all, it was only five years ago that bitcoin appeared on the scene and provided the world with the first open-source, decentralized alternative to government controlled currencies. And it’s really only in the last year that bitcoin has begun to gain traction as a payment option.
 
Now bitcoin faces competition. Hundreds of bitcoin knockoffs—“altcoins,” as they are commonly called—have been built.
 
The software that underpins bitcoin is open-source, so anyone can copy and tweak the code to create their own digital currency. You can even pay someone to do it for you: The owner of a Web site called Coingen, for example, promises to start a new bitcoin clone for anyone who pays a fee of 0.05 bitcoin. All you have to do is give it a name.