What is Bitcoin? How You can start and how fast can you make your own Bitcoin?

Bitcoin may have become a thing of fascination for the media very recently, but the digital currency actually celebrated its fifth birthday this month as its value hovered at around $1,000 per coin.

Bitcoin was never intended to be the one cryptocurrency to rule them all, because anyone can make their own version of it. The code which underpins the currency is released under what's known as an open-source licence. Anyone can use it themselves, and alter any aspect they want, in order to create a whole new currency.

A whole class of alternative crypto-currencies, based on the fundamental aspects of bitcoin, have been created over the past couple of years. The first and biggest of the "altcoins", called Litecoin, was created in 2011 to address some perceived flaws in the Bitcoin protocol.

Litecoin is much harder to build specialised "mining" machines for, which, according to its founders, prevents it from being dominated by a few rich miners. Additionally, it clears payments faster and has a much higher cap of 84m coins.

Since November 2011, Litecoin has tracked the value of Bitcoin fairly closely, but in December last year it spiked in value. Overnight, a Litecoin was worth 10 times what it had been before, and its total market cap now stands at $623m, around 16% of that of its parent.

Wow, very cryptocurrency
Measuring press attention alone, Litecoin is surely eclipsed by another altcoin with a far more compelling hook: Dogecoin.

Whereas Litecoin requires an already deep understanding of cryptocurrencies to explain the ways in which it improves on Bitcoin, Dogecoin has simpler selling point: it's got a picture of a Shiba Inu dog on the front.

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Read with a straight face, it's a triumph of marketing. Take a field which anyone can enter, and where the average user has little or no way to distinguish between competing examples; and then whack the most popular meme of 2013, Doge, on the front of your own. (Doge, for those of you still unaware, is a meme involving pictures of a confused-looking Shiba Inu with brightly coloured comic sans text surrounding it, spelling out in idiosyncratic broken English the animal's thoughts. Wow. Very internet. Such bafflement.)

Except, of course, reading it with a straight face is not the point: Dogecoin was created as a joke, to appeal to the sort of person who would find it funny. And it worked – the total value of all Dogecoins in circulation is now worth almost $7m, making it the 16th most valuable alt coin in existence.

If it seemed like Dogecoin was the pinnacle of the altcoin madness – coinmarketcap.com, which only tracks the ones people have actually bothered to buy and sell on exchanges, already records almost 70 – then the news from Thursday that a few coders were preparing to launch a currency based on Kanye West called, naturally, [Coinye West], proves that the idea still has legs.

How to make your own vanity money
So obviously I wanted a piece of the action. It was time to launch Herncoin.

It turns out, though, that cloning bitcoin is actually harder than it looks. Although the code behind the currency is open source, it's not like the designers have just left a nice file where you can change a few lines of code to end up with a whole new currency.

It actually takes some serious programming ability to get started: Dogecoin's technical co-founder, a software engineer from Portland, had to put in a couple of days of solid work to get the currency off the ground. Without a solid backing in C programming in the C language, I had no hope of creating Herncoin myself.

Thankfully, Matt Corallo, a veteran bitcoin developer, came to the rescue. On Friday, he opened the doors to Coingen.io, offering to create a forked version of Bitcoin for anyone with 0.01 BTC (around $10) to spare.

With Corallo's tools, the job becomes the work of minutes.

Get yourself some bitcoin. You'll need 0.01 BTC to make your own altcoin, but if you're serious you'll want to splash out another 0.1 BTC to get the source code to your creation. Though… if you're actually serious, you probably want to hire an actual programmer to code your vanity money.
Customise your coin. Coingen.io lets you pick a name and a logo, and then alter the starting paramenters of bitcoin as you see fit. If you have strong opinions over how many bitcoins should be given as a reward for mining, this is your chance to have a say. Again, though, if you have strong opinions about that sort of thing, maybe an off-the-shelf cryptocoin isn't for you.
Download your vanity coin. It'll only work on Windows or Linux, sadly, but just run the finished software and away you go. I'll leave the hardest bit – finding someone else to join in – to you.