GameCoin (GMC) is a digital currency targeted towards the gaming community. GMC tokens go on sale at the end of September through the GameCoin ICO. GameCoin aims to increase the revenue of the gaming industry by 3 times – or 300 billion dollars per year. It aims to allow players to earn money from their hobby. And, within a year, the developers claim the capitalization of GameCoin will “exceed and billion dollars and will continue to grow rapidly.” GameCoin is being proposed as a way to monetize the world of free gaming. The GameCoin whitepaper explains that the majority of gaming revenue comes from 10% of users. Today, developers are struggling to monetize the remaining 90% of users. GameCoin claims to have found a way to do that using blockchain technology. Basically, GameCoin’s idea is to allow each game developer to create their own cryptocurrency. This cryptocurrency is used as in-game money. The developers can create this cryptocurrency at virtually no cost to themselves – it’s just a digital token that has value in the game. However, by the time it circulates through gamers, the token will have value because it can be used to pay for in-game items. In more straightforward terms, GameCoin plans to make it easy for developers to create a secure in-game currency. It appears that these cryptocurrencies will operate as forks on the GameCoin blockchain. Each developer will be able to make their own fork – so gamers can easily apply their GWC tokens to any game of their choice (the GameCoin wallet will support all forks).
Bytecoin is the first cryptocurrency created with CryptoNote technology. Bytecoin allows users to make absolutely anonymous money transfers through the CryptoNote algorithm. CryptoNote uses CryptoNote ring signatures to provide anonymous transactions and allows you to sign a message on behalf of a group. The signature only proves the message was created by someone from the group, but all the possible signers are indistinguishable from each other. Even if outgoing transactions are untraceable, everyone may still be able to see the payments received and thus determine one's income. By using a variation of the Diffie-Hellman exchange protocol, a receiver has multiple unique one-time addresses derived from his single public key. After funds are sent to these addresses they can only be redeemed by the receiver; and it would be impossible to cross-link these payments. As a primarily peer-to-peer (p2p) payment system, Bytecoin has many of the same use-cases as Bitcoin. Created in 2012, Bytecoin is one of the earliest developed cryptocurrencies. Until recently, the team behind the coin has kept themselves anonymous. Now, though, they’ve opened up multiple communication channels, removed some layers of anonymity, and even built several local communities. Bitcoin’s PoW consensus algorithm heavily favors miners that use powerful GPU and ASIC machines over those trying to mine with CPUs. This causes the network to centralize around the more powerful miners. Bytecoin attempts to close the gap between these two classes of miners with a new algorithm, Egalitarian Proof-of-Work (PoW). Egalitarian PoW uses a version of skrypt, a proof of work function similar to the hashcash function used by Bitcoin. The difference between the two is that scrypt isn’t memory bound. Because of this, you can produce highly efficient CPU mining rigs. GPUs will always be about 10 times more effective, though. The Bytecoin project has been fairly fractured since its inception in July 2012. Previously, several isolated teams worked on the project without seemingly communicating with each other. This led to numerous forks and versions of the coin. In July 2017, the team decided to change their image and provide more transparency to the community. The team still remains pseudo-anonymous by only providing names and headshots on their webpage – no bios or social media links. But, it’s tough to expect more from a project that’s focused on privacy. The team has been busy at work refactoring their code and are planning to release a new public API on February 6, 2018. They’ll also be entering the Asian, Middle East, and African markets throughout 2018.