Updated October 2026: This post has been expanded from its original January 2014 version from a one-line link into a full history of the 2013–2014 altcoin boom: how people made their own digital currencies, what tools existed, and what became of most of those coins. It is a historical account; details describe the time it covers, not today.
In January 2014, "make your own digital currency" was a real headline in mainstream newspapers. Bitcoin had just gone through its first big public price spike, a joke coin with a Shiba Inu dog on it was suddenly one of the most traded cryptocurrencies in the world, and websites had appeared that promised to build a brand-new coin for you in about half an hour. This blog linked to one of those stories at the time with a single line.
This expanded version tells the story properly. It explains why so many people wanted their own coin in 2013 and early 2014, how those coins were actually made, what the coin-generator websites offered, and what happened to the thousands of altcoins launched in that period. It is history, not investment advice. If anything, the record of that era is a strong argument for caution.
The backdrop: Bitcoin’s breakout year
Bitcoin had existed since 2009, but 2013 was the year it became a regular news story. Its price swung wildly through the spring, fell to around $50 in April after peaking at $266, and climbed again later in the year. In November it shot from roughly $200 to $900 in about two weeks, and on November 28, 2013 it passed $1,000 on the Mt. Gox exchange for the first time.
The excitement did not last long without a jolt. On December 5, 2013, the People’s Bank of China barred Chinese financial institutions from handling bitcoin, although individuals could still trade it. Prices fell sharply on the news. Within a few months Mt. Gox, which had handled more than 70% of the world’s bitcoin trades from April 2013 into 2014, collapsed. It filed for bankruptcy on February 28, 2014, saying roughly 850,000 bitcoins belonging to customers and the company were missing; it later found about 200,000 of them in an old wallet.
That combination of huge price moves and heavy media attention created a simple question in many people’s minds: if Bitcoin is just open-source software, why not launch another one?
Altcoins before the boom
The idea was not new. Because Bitcoin’s code is open source, anyone can copy it, change some settings, and start a separate network with its own blockchain. Coins created this way became known as altcoins, short for alternative coins.
Two early examples set the pattern. Namecoin, released in April 2011, was forked from Bitcoin’s software with a specific purpose: a decentralized naming system, mainly for a .bit domain that operated outside the usual domain-name authorities. Litecoin, released by Charlie Lee on October 7, 2011, kept most of Bitcoin’s design but changed several key numbers. It used a different mining algorithm called scrypt instead of Bitcoin’s SHA-256, targeted a new block every 2.5 minutes instead of every 10, and capped total supply at 84 million coins instead of 21 million.
Litecoin mattered because it showed how little you had to change to create a distinct coin. Many of the altcoins that followed were copies of Litecoin, which was itself a copy of Bitcoin with a few parameters adjusted.
Dogecoin: the joke that took off
The coin that defined the moment launched on December 6, 2013. Dogecoin was created by two software engineers, Billy Markus in Portland, Oregon, and Jackson Palmer in Sydney, explicitly as a joke about the speculative frenzy around cryptocurrency. Markus based it on Luckycoin and Litecoin, so it used the same scrypt mining approach, and it borrowed the popular "Doge" internet meme as its mascot.
The joke caught on fast. Its price nearly quadrupled in 72 hours around December 19, 2013, then fell about 80% a few days later as China’s bitcoin restrictions spooked the market. On Christmas Day, millions of coins were stolen in a hack of a wallet service called Dogewallet. In January 2014, Dogecoin’s trading volume briefly exceeded that of all other cryptocurrencies combined, even though its total value was far below Bitcoin’s.
Dogecoin also became known for small-scale generosity. In January 2014 its community raised money to help Jamaica’s bobsled team get to the Sochi Winter Olympics, and in March 2014 the Dogecoin Foundation collected donations for a clean-water project in Kenya. Those stories helped make it one of the few coins from the era with an identity beyond price speculation.
- April 2011
Namecoin, an early fork of Bitcoin’s software, is released. - October 7, 2011
Charlie Lee releases Litecoin, which becomes the template for many later coins. - July 23, 2013
The U.S. SEC charges a Texas man with running a bitcoin Ponzi scheme and warns investors about virtual-currency scams. - November 28, 2013
Bitcoin passes $1,000 on Mt. Gox for the first time. - December 5, 2013
China bars its financial institutions from handling bitcoin. - December 6, 2013
Dogecoin launches as a joke coin. - January 2014
Coin-generator sites such as Coingen draw press attention; Dogecoin trading volume briefly tops all other cryptocurrencies combined. - February 28, 2014
Mt. Gox files for bankruptcy. - March 25, 2014
Auroracoin begins its airdrop to people in Iceland’s national ID registry.
How people actually made a coin in 2014
For anyone with some programming experience, creating an altcoin in 2014 followed a fairly standard recipe. It did not require inventing anything. It required copying an existing coin and changing its settings.
1. Fork an existing codebase
Developers started from the public source code of Bitcoin or, more often, Litecoin. They renamed the coin throughout the code, changed its ticker symbol, and assigned new network ports so the new coin’s computers would talk to each other instead of to Bitcoin or Litecoin nodes.
2. Change the economic parameters
The interesting decisions were a handful of numbers: how often a new block should be created, how many coins each block would pay to miners, how often that reward would be cut in half, and the total number of coins that would ever exist. Dogecoin, for example, paid 10,000 coins per block with a one-minute target block time and originally planned a cap of 100 billion coins, far larger than Bitcoin’s supply. Its developers later dropped the cap in February 2014 so that a steady stream of new coins would keep being created.
3. Create the genesis block
Every blockchain starts with a first block, called the genesis block, that is written into the software. The coin’s creator had to generate one for the new chain before anyone else could start mining.
4. Build the network around it
This was the hard part, and it had nothing to do with code. A coin with no miners, no wallets people trusted, no exchange listing, and no reason to exist was effectively worthless. Creators had to persuade people to run the software, set up mining pools, convince an exchange to list the coin, and give the public a reason to care.
Coin-generator websites
By early 2014, even the coding step had been automated. The best-known service was Coingen, created by a Reddit user and covered by outlets including the New Statesman in January 2014 and Cointelegraph that April. It worked like an online order form for a cryptocurrency.
| Coingen feature (2014) | What it meant |
|---|---|
| Template | Choose a Bitcoin-style (SHA-256) or Litecoin-style (scrypt) coin. |
| Settings | Adjust a few numbers such as block rate, starting reward per block, and halving schedule. |
| Price | 0.05 BTC for a basic build; up to 0.2 BTC to remove Coingen branding and get the source code. |
| Delivery | A downloadable wallet build, promised within about half an hour of payment. |
| Not included | No peer-to-peer network, mining pool, or exchange listing. Buyers had to mine their own genesis block. |
Details as reported by the New Statesman (January 6, 2014) and Cointelegraph (April 18, 2014).
Reviewers were skeptical. The New Statesman’s writer called the service "completely useless," pointing out that Bitcoin’s source code was free and that buyers could only change a few values. He compared it to the Gold Rush, when shovel sellers often did better than prospectors. That comparison turned out to be a fair summary of the whole era: the most dependable money was usually made by people selling tools, services, and hype to would-be coin creators.
Gimmicks and giveaways
Because the technology was so easy to copy, new coins competed on stories. Some were tied to a country or community. The best-known example was Auroracoin, which promoted itself as a currency for Iceland and began an "airdrop" on March 25, 2014, setting aside half its supply so that each person in Iceland’s national ID database could claim 31.8 coins. Others were built around a celebrity, a meme, a sports team, or simply a funny name. The New Statesman noted coins being generated with names like "jesuscoin" and worse.
Many of these coins were also designed so that their creators benefited first. A common practice was premining, where the developers mined a large share of coins before announcing the coin publicly, then sold them once outside buyers arrived. In the worst cases, coins were launched specifically to be promoted, pumped up in price, and dumped on latecomers.
What happened next
Most altcoins from this period did not survive. Researchers at CoinKickoff, working from failed-coin data collected by Coinopsy and checked against CoinMarketCap listings, looked at coins by the year they launched and counted how many were "dead" by 2022. They classed a coin as dead if it was a failed coin offering, a scam or joke coin, or had been abandoned with less than $1,000 in trading volume over three months.
Coins launched in 2014 had the highest failure rate in that analysis: roughly three out of four were dead by 2022. A separate Bitcoin Magazine analysis using CoinKickoff data, published in January 2023, estimated that 91% of the cryptocurrencies that existed during the 2014 market crash had since been abandoned. Newer coins look healthier in those charts partly because they have had less time to fail.
A few coins from the era did last. Litecoin remained one of the better-known cryptocurrencies. Dogecoin, the joke, kept going too, and in an ironic twist it ended up merge-mined alongside Litecoin, the coin it was originally built from. Its founders’ point about speculation arguably proved truer than they expected.
A caution section: lessons that still apply
The tools have changed since 2014. Today many new tokens are created on top of existing blockchains rather than by forking an entire coin. But the underlying risks look very similar, and regulators were already warning about them in 2013.
- Creating a coin is easy; creating value is not. The code is the cheap part. A coin with no users, no real purpose, and no trustworthy team has little reason to hold its price.
- Be wary of promised returns. On July 23, 2013, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged a Texas man with running a bitcoin-denominated Ponzi scheme and issued an investor alert about virtual-currency scams. Its core advice still holds: be suspicious of offers that promise high returns with little or no risk.
- Check who got the coins first. Heavy premining or a large share held by insiders means early holders can sell into any price rise.
- Exchanges and wallets can fail. Mt. Gox and the Dogewallet hack both showed that the place you store a coin can be the weakest link, regardless of the coin itself.
- Volume and hype are not the same as durability. Dogecoin briefly out-traded everything else in January 2014, and so did plenty of coins that no longer exist.
- Know the rules where you live. Launching or selling a token to the public can raise legal questions about securities and taxes. If you are serious about it, talk to a qualified professional first.
None of this is financial advice, and this article does not recommend buying, selling, or creating any cryptocurrency. It is a record of what happened the last time making your own money felt as easy as filling in a web form.
The bottom line
The 2013–2014 altcoin boom showed how easy it is to copy a blockchain and how hard it is to give a copy lasting value. Services like Coingen turned coin creation into a product you could buy for a fraction of a bitcoin, and thousands of coins followed. A handful, including Litecoin and the accidental success Dogecoin, endured. Most of the rest are now footnotes, and the people who did best were often those selling the shovels.
Sources
- New Statesman: A website now generates off-the-shelf cryptocurrencies (Jan 2014)
- Cointelegraph: How to make your own altcoin (Apr 2014)
- Wikipedia: Dogecoin
- Wikipedia: Litecoin
- Wikipedia: Namecoin
- Wikipedia: Auroracoin
- Wikipedia: History of bitcoin
- Wikipedia: Mt. Gox
- SEC press release 2013-132: Bitcoin Ponzi scheme charges and investor alert
- Hedge Fund Alpha: The number of failed crypto coins by year, 2013–2022
- Nasdaq / Bitcoin Magazine: 91% of cryptos from 2014 have died (Jan 2023)
Top image: "Casascius coin" by Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (resized). Charts by Thank You Robot.
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