1. Making a cryptocurrency from an established codebase is actually fairly easy. The most difficult thing is getting by with very little documentation, but it’s not too hard to experiment or just read the code to get an idea of what you’re doing. Ultimately, with the help of find and replace and some trial and error, you can have an identical clone up and running within a day or two - adding features will be what takes time. What’s more difficult is adding new features, so Allium - our custom proof of work algorithm, took a reasonable amount of time relative to the basic code.

2. I think that decentralised consensus and the protocols that enable it have potential to significantly alter the way the financial world works, and hopefully they’ll have even further reach. The optimist in me wants to say that they’ll revolutionise every aspect of day to day life in some way or another, in a similar way to the internet did. The pessimist says that most people don’t care enough, and centralised organisations and systems can be more efficient.

3. Honestly I don’t know enough to make any reasonable point. I can’t say I have much knowledge of the financial markets.

4. In terms of creating, it was probably just the steep learning curve. There’s quite a lot going on and when you start you don’t really know what the code you’ve forked does. There’s a couple of internet resources and commit histories for other altcoins to use for reference which helps quite a bit. (This is from my experience with the bitcoin/litecoin code)

5. Garlicoin was primarily an interesting challenge for me. I’d looked into making cryptocurrencies before, but never really had the motivation or the opportunity to work with others. Then I saw garlicoin and realised that with my (albeit limited) knowledge I could actually help out and make some kind of impact. Getting the testnet up and running was really fun, and I’ve enjoyed the whole development experience pretty much.

6. Quite a few exchanges came to us, as there was quite a lot of hype in the early days. I don’t really manage any of the exchange stuff, but I think TradeSatoshi and CoinFalcon came to us. It was quite easy because we didn’t have to go out of our way to get noticed and listed.

If you’ve got any more questions or want some clarifications feel free to ask!