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I'm aware that LiteCoin is (was?) the "silver" to bitcoin's "gold".

The question is:

What was the first altcoin? Was it actually LiteCoin or was there something else?

For the purposes of "alt coin"

  1. What was the first fork of bitcoin
  2. What was the first altcoin that more than, say, 10 people mined?
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Litecoin was not the first altcoin. It actually uses ideas for altcoins that precede it but had died before it was created. This is mentioned in its announcement thread on bitcointalk.. The very first altcoin was actually Namecoin, announced in April 2011. Namecoin was actively used and mined, and can still be used today.

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As described by Ava Chow, Namecoin was the first altcoin created as such. It was announced on 2011-04-18.

However, according to the topic "Testnet version history" the Testnet1 was reset after its coins started to be traded for value. Testnet2 was kicked off on 2011-02-03, which would allow a case to be made for Testnet1 to have been the first altcoin.

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Namecoin, for sure, can read more about it here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin

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