Bitcoin developers are moving away to create their own cryptocurrencies — here’s why

• Business Insider UK spoke with Garrick Hileman about Bitcoin.
• Hileman explains how Bitcoin became the largest cryptocurrency on the market.
• He then explains why that has meant Bitcoin developers are moving on and setting up their own cryptocurrencies.

Business Insider UK spoke with University of Cambridge Research Fellow Garrick Hileman aboutBitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and why developers are starting to move away from Bitcoin.

He explains that the reason Bitcoin grew so quickly in the beginning was that there were no other cryptocurrencies on the market.

This gave developers an opportunity to cut their teeth and led to the development of cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and Litecoin.

Full transcript below.

Garrick Hileman: So Bitcoin became number one in large part because it was first and for a long time it was really the only cryptocurrency game in town and so many developers who were interested in cryptocurrency kind of cut their teeth working on Bitcoin and remaining quite loyal to it.

But a number of people have left the Bitcoin community to start other cryptocurrencies because they wanted to go in a different direction and I think the case for Ethereum is particularly important here it really shows that you can build something quite significant away from Bitcoin doing very different things, very different approaches to the technology.

So very talented people who are coming into the space now may have more of an incentive to try to build their own cryptocurrency or new blockchain based system rather than to build on something that’s already in place because we’ve seen now that you can create something new and you can accrue tremendous value if you are on the ground floor of that.

Produced by Jasper Pickering. Camera by Leon Siciliano. Research by Fraser Moore.