It looks like the "altcoins" set originated as a set of Bitcoin derivations with slightly different parameters, but eventually started to contain a bunch of cryptocurrency-related things.

People (myself included) end up submitting patches like this one with a useless layer of indirection:

• pkgs/applications/altcoins/default.nix

  ethrun = callPackage ./ethrun.nix { };
  

• pkgs/top-level/all-packages.nix

  ethrun = self.altcoins.ethrun;
  

Also the name is rather a misnomer. There are some cryptocurrency-related tools in here (or not in here yet but that belong grouped with these packages), not just the "coin" nodes themselves. And I believe some would vehemently disagree with the classification of Ethereum as an "altcoin".

So I propose we:

• Rename pkgs/applications/altcoins to pkgs/applications/cryptocurrency
• Move everything from pkgs/applications/altcoins/default.nix into pkgs/top-level/all-packages.nix
• Move various packages into pkgs/applications/cryptocurrency:
  • pkgs/tools/misc/libbitcoin - includes the bx command-line tool for Bitcoin-related things
  • pkgs/applications/misc/qtbitcointrader - Bitcoin trading client
  • pkgs/tools/security/secp256k1 - technically isn't specifically cryptocurrency-related, but it's the elliptic curve popularized by Bitcoin and the library is maintained by bitcoin-core
  • pkgs/servers/trezord - daemon for using a Bitcoin hardware wallet
  • pkgs/applications/misc/vanitygen - a Bitcoin vanity address generator
  • pkgs/applications/misc/electrum - a Bitcoin wallet
  • pkgs/applications/misc/cgminer - a Bitcoin GPU miner