It is an alternative coin. Hence "altcoin."

I think of blockchain currency as coins and currency issued by a blockchain as tokens (i.e. ERC20).

There's no fundamental difference. Currently there are implementation differences but those will go away. Eventually Ether will be ERC20 compliant.

>Eventually Ether will be ERC20 compliant.

Citation?

Ether is privileged on Ethereum. It's what mining gets you, it's what transaction fees are paid in, if proof-of-stake comes around, it will be what's staked, and any transaction can include some. I don't expect any of these to change.

I think the reference is EIP 101: Crypto Abstraction which is planned for the Serenity release.

https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/28

Thanks, that's interesting. I take back some of my incredulity from my previous post!

No because it is based on a different generation of the blockchain design. The same way that iOS is not an alt-blackberry.

Altcoin hasn't referred to Bitcoin forks in years.

I've seen the term fall out of usage. Years ago, when Bitcoin made up 90% of the cryptocurrency market cap, and nearly every other cryptocurrency was a fork of Bitcoin, with a name that was some variation of *coin (e.g. Litecoin, Peercoin, Dogecoin, Novacoin, BBQcoin) it made sense. Not so much now anymore, with Bitcoin's market cap under 50%, and original projects being its major competitors.

Market cap is a poor way to measure each coin. You can create your own coin premine 1 million of them. Sell a few for ~5 dollars and claim it has a market cap of 5 million dollars.

Market cap can be a totally valid way to measure total worth. In the case of a cryptocurrency with a large circulating and trading volume, like Ether, it's a reliable measure of total value.