Could someone help me with the math on Feathercoin and maybe some other altcoins? Currently I have BTC, LTC, TRC and BTE and I'd like to trade some of those coins for FC but I have no clue how
to calculate price ratios. What aspects of coin should one look at? Number of coins one can mine with hardware X in some period of time? Does total number of coins to be mined, are already mined, difficulty
and adoption / usefulness of some coin matter at all or is just "if I can mine 1 BTC per day or 100 LTC per day, price for 1 LTC is 0.01 BTC"?
If only Alternate Currency price could be modeled with a statistical model accurately, trading would be so easy.
Unfortunately, each different Alternate currency has a different adoption pattern, many go dormant for months and then come back, some have a huge initial burst and then are abandoned, and some are adopted quickly by exchanges while others take longer.
Generally speaking, logic would prevail with mining 1 BTC a day vs x amount of Alt per day so the value of the Alt would be BTC/Alt in a time period. However, this model simply loosely models reality. If this were true, dustcoin.com's percents should all be around 100% (aside from merge-mineable coins).
Adoption and usefulness sadly aren't two sides of the same coin, but they do have some correlation.
It may be a good idea to graph current prices, past prices, and try to visually predict future patterns, however some people get heavily burned while doing this. Personally, I like to diversify my holdings between a lot of alternate currencies and Bitcoin itself. It is never a bad idea to keep a few thousand of each coin, so if one becomes huge you aren't kicking yourself. With feathercoin, all my holdings are just from coins that I mined at launch, but if I had not been on the early mining boat I would be probably converting around 8% of my Litecoins into feathercoins.
Best of luck, trading is really confusing!
