Bitcoin is the first digital currency based on blockchain. It solved the double-spending problem and enabled peer-to-peer transactions on a large scale. Bitcoin was designed to work as a trustless digital currency that would function without government oversight or a central bank.
Bitcoin was developed by Satoshi Nakamoto, whose identity has never been confirmed and has become the subject of great intrigue. Bitcoin builds upon on other cryptographic and digital currency projects that came before it, but its use of blockchain made it more viable. Nakamoto originally released his white paper and open-source software on a cryptography forum. He mined the first block of the Bitcoin chain, called the genesis block in January 2009.
Bitcoins are created as a reward for a process known as mining. One of the core innovations of Bitcoin, is its consensus algorithm, which creates an incentive system that rewards miners for confirming transactions.
Hal Finney, who developed the first reusable proof-of-work system (RPOW), several years before, was the first Bitcoin adopter and received the first bitcoin transaction ever recorded on its blockchain.

Crown is a cryptocurrency and development platform with a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism, and an emphasis on community governance. It combines some of the technical capabilities of Bitcoin and Dash. It is currently merge mined with Bitcoin, but is developing a new consensus model called Crown Atomic.

ZClassic is a privacy focused crytpocurrency that is a fork of ZCash. ZClassic enables a high degree of privacy and anonymity of transactions.The key differences between ZClassic and ZCash are the elimination of the 20% mining fee that are allocated as a "founders' reward" and the removal of ZCash's block limit, that was intended to create scarcity.