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Almost everyone seems to be using ERC20, but not everyone is. I wasn't able to find a comprehensible overview of subcurrencies standards/usecases and pros & cons of using ERC20 in your system / resources that compare tokens implemented for different systems.

As far as I understood it is possible to have different divisibility and even affect gas costs for your contract or a system of contracts depending on your subcurrency parameters.

My impression was that the popularity of ERC20 by large explained by adoption - that it makes it easier for 3rd parties to integrate it in the outside of Ethereum contexts.

Can anyone recommend a good read explaining other reasons for ERC20 popularity that helps to wrap one's head around whether it makes sense to use it, spend time and effort on your own implementation or look for other implementations that have been tested to a certain extent.

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  • As far as I know, there are no mainstream alternative token implementations to ERC20. There might not be any such document. – Matthew Schmidt Mar 19 '17 at 15:50
  • The idea of ERC20 is to make a standard interface to all token contracts. It's just a minimum requirement for contracts to be able to interact with your token properly. There's nothing forcing you to use it, but if you want people to actually use your token, I suggest you follow the standard – Tjaden Hess♦ Mar 21 '17 at 14:12
  • The first answer (by Eth) to this question below explains the usefulness of some of the ERC20 features: belowhttps://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/16714/what-are-the-key-criteria-for-meeting-the-erc20-token-standard – Tesa May 29 '17 at 12:27
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ERC20, pro: If you use ERC20, the tokens/subcurrencies that you design will be readable from the GUI program Ethereum Wallet[1]. This way you can easily test whether your token conforms to the ERC20 by looking at whether you can add this token to the Ethereum Wallet program running on your computer.

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