Altcoins, meaning "alternative coins", is another term for cryptocurrencies (other than Bitcoin). Since Bitcoin's release in 2009, many have noticed its crucial advantages over government money, while also giving recognition to the fact that some of its aspects can be improved upon. That has lead to the appearance of hundreds of different altcoins, which are all ultimately based on the same technology of the Blockchain but are designed differently in some ways, in order to achieve different goals.
Litecoin is a cryptocurrency, which was created in 2011 as a lightweight alternative to Bitcoin; the two key differences between them are: - Litecoin's smaller time intervals between adding new blocks to its Blockchain, which is supposed to decrease transaction times; - Litecoin's mining is governed by the Scrypt algorithm, as opposed to Bitcoin's SHA 256. The purpose of this is to restrict ASIC miners and allow users to efficiently mine Litecoin on regular PC's; it was working as intended for some time until Scrypt ASICs were developed. Since its creation, Litecoin has been very popular, with an almost constant presence in the top 5 of cryptocurrencies by market capitalization (albeit never beating Bitcoin in that regard).
Dogecoin is an alternative cryptocurrency, which was created in 2013. It is based on Litecoin and is quite similar to it from a technical standpoint. What separates Dogecoin from every other cryptocurrency is the fact that it uses Doge as its mascot. Doge is a meme associated with imagery of a Shiba Inu breed with colorful captions of the dog's supposed internal monolog. Originally intended as a joke currency, Dogecoin unexpectedly exploded thanks to a dedicated community of Doge fans, at one point reaching a market capitalization of more than $91 mln. The coin remains highly popular even in 2016.
Dash (known earlier as Darkcoin) is a very popular alternative cryptocurrency with a focus on transaction speed and privacy. Instead of using a single mining algorithm (like Bitcoin's SHA-256 or Litecoin's Scrypt), it relies on X11 - a collection of 11 algorithms which are there to ensure fair distribution of coins between miners. At the time of writing, it holds a firm position in the top 10 of cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.
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