Introducing altcoins
Currently, as of mid-2020, there are thousands of altcoins on the market, and they hold some monetary value, such as Namecoin, Zcash, Litecoin, and many others. Zcash is a more successful altcoin, introduced in 2016. On the other hand, Primecoin did not gain much popularity, but it is still in use. Many of these alternative projects are direct forks of Bitcoin source code, although some have been written from scratch. Some altcoins set out to address Bitcoin limitations such as privacy. Some others offer different types of mining, changes in block times, and distribution schemes.
By definition, an altcoin is generated in the case of a hard fork. If Bitcoin has a harder fork, then the other, older chain is effectively considered another coin. However, there is no established rule as to which chain becomes the altcoin. This has happened with Ethereum, where a hard fork caused a new currency, Ethereum Classic (ETC), to come into existence...