It turns out, though, that cloning bitcoin is actually harder than it looks. Although the code behind the currency is open source, it’s not like the designers have just left a nice file where you can change a few lines of code to end up with a whole new currency.

It actually takes some serious programming ability to get started: Dogecoin’s technical co-founder, a software engineer from Portland, had to put in a couple of days of solid work to get the currency off the ground. Without a solid backing in C programming in the C language, I had no hope of creating Herncoin myself.

Thankfully, Matt Corallo, a veteran bitcoin developer, came to the rescue. On Friday, he opened the doors to Coingen.io, offering to create a forked version of Bitcoin for anyone with 0.01 BTC (around $10) to spare.

Read the full article on the San Jose Mercury News here.