Improving Bitcoin: One Altcoin At a Time
At Horizen, we believe that contributing to altcoins is the best way to help improve Bitcoin, and cryptocurrency in general. Some would say that Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency worth contributing to, but we wholeheartedly disagree.
“The people who contribute to alternative cryptocurrencies contribute directly to Bitcoin and the rest of the cryptocurrency ecosystem.” – Rolf Versluis
Rolf, the co-founder of Horizen, recently published an article stating that contributing to any cryptocurrency directly contributes to all coins, including Bitcoin. The reason? No matter where you choose to put your efforts, coming up with new ideas and implementing them is how cryptocurrencies advance.
Promoting change and new ideas is the essence of progress. We believe that telling people not to contribute to new projects hinders new and exciting projects and ideas. Supporting creativity is how we build a stronger future.
Of course, directly helping existing projects is not the only way to contribute. One can indirectly influence projects through competition. Competition fuels companies. With competition, creative energy is unleashed, new ideas are formed, and people take the actions necessary to implement their ideas.
When Horizen first launched, we decided to start building from a chain split of an existing project, rather than a new blockchain. Doing so allowed us to reach a wider group of people who supported our project because they knew it would benefit them as well. Without them, we would not have been as successful as we are today. It provided opportunities that we would never have had otherwise.
Not to say we didn’t experience issues when we first launched, our transaction replay implementation was flawed. Thankfully, some talented IOHK developers contributed to our project, and Horizen was saved. Without the contribution of people from another team, we would have failed and would not have been able to create and implement the visions that we had for the future of our project.
Every contributor and community member that actively works to make Horizen better also helps to make Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency projects better and stronger. The 51% attack protection upgrade we implemented after this attack has already influenced other projects.
When people claim that Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency project that matters, they aren’t seeing the bigger picture. All cryptocurrency and blockchain developers, users, and merchants contribute to the progress of these technologies by introducing new creative ideas. The Horizen team will continue to gain inspiration, implement new ideas, and contribute to the improvement of all projects as we continue growing as a company and a community.
Afterword
Click here if you would like to read the full article by our co-founder, Rolf Versluis.
