(Dutch version here)

A considerable number of crypto coins would like to become a generally usable means of payment. Some want to exist next to the Euro and some want to exist instead of the Euro. Which cryptographic coin has the best papers and has made the right design choices?

In this research, 32 crypto currencies, that have this wish, will be examined and investigated in the areas of Security, Availability, User-friendliness, Technical user aspects, Maintenance, etc. It does not look at the Marketcap or value of the crypto currency but only whether they are well equipped to perform the task as a means of payment.

Which Crypto currencies are participating? To this end the 350 first mentioned currencies on Coinmarketcap were examined and if the website of the coin in question specifically mentioned that they wanted to be a means of payment, the coin was included in this investigation. The currencies on place 351–2079 are not included to limit the amount of work somewhat. Maybe there are jewels in between but unfortunately :)

Coinmarketcap is only used for the selection method and source of data. No attention is given to the ranking method Coinmarketcap uses. For criticism of that method see this story (Dutch only)

It turned out that 32 coins met the criterion. Most Tokens/coins present themselves as a platform to facilitate other functions and therefore fell outside the scope of this study. The 32 are:

The list is in alphabetical order except for the last two. These coins, the Apollo currency (APL) and the E-Dinar coin (EDR) did meet the criterion but on closer look both coins appeared to have so much ambiguity that they were excluded from participation.

What is striking is that there are also 6 coins participating which are a fork of another coin. Namely BCH, BCD, BTG, BTCP, ZEN, ZCL. Where BTCP is a combination of BTC and ZEC.

Once the list was complete, the specific characteristics of all the coins were searched and placed in a spreadsheet. Then we assessed how the coins score on seven topics that will be discussed below. The different coins are assessed per subject via the scale:

Excellent: 10 punten

Very good: 8 punten

Good: 5 punten

Fair: 3 punten

Poor 0 punten

In addition, the subjects are given a value coefficient by which the score is multiplied. This is done because certain topics are considered more important than other topics. When all scores are taken together, we get a ranking to see which coin most closely matches the requirements to form a means of payment system.

Safety

The most important thing about a potential coin is, of course, the safety of the blockchain that goes with it. Finally, the user must be able to trust that the coin cannot be hacked easily or that you can easily be robbed. Therefore, the value coefficient of the subject of security also has a high value of 3.

Security problems that a blockchain can run into are for example so-called “double spend”, “51% attacks”, “Selfish mining”, “side chain mining” etc. It takes too long to discuss these kinds of security problems here but there is plenty to find on the Internet.

The security of the blockchain depends on a number of things such as which mining system is used with which protocol, how much mining power is on the network, what it costs to perform a 51% attack, whether the wallet can be encrypted during Stake and whether extra measures such as masternodes etc. are taken. Below a table with the rating of the subject security. The remarks column contains a justification for the chosen rating. Please note that PoS is rated slightly higher than PoW.