Hey guys
What you think about other crypto currencies ?
Who will be the next great name ? I see lot of programs with new coins... but don't have an opinion. I try to know where investing.
I personally don't think there is going to be any cryptocurrency that will end up being bigger than Bitcoin to be honest, so far we're looking at Ethereum and Monero being the only legitimate contenders and both have failed in achieving that goal. ETH broke itself with the network hack and then the divide in Ethereum into ETH and ETC, and Monero got pumped by the darknet and subsequently dumped.
I think that the fact that ethereum and monero are/were seen as potential contenders for the crypto stardom, is that both of them address a shortcoming of bitcoin. Ethereum addresses the limitation in bitcoin's potential to do smart contracts ; and monero addresses the lack of privacy of bitcoin. Whether exactly these two coins will make it, I don't know, but what is for sure, is that they both address two serious shortcomings of bitcoin itself. My idea is that sooner or later, these issues will become so important that another system solving them will become dominant. In my idea, the shortcoming of privacy is more important than the idea of smart contract ; I would even say that smart contracts need even more privacy than a simple currency, and that a "monero" version of ethereum is actually needed. I think that hawk is such a project.
That said, we are getting carried away here, because we are talking as if crypto was really used a lot. It is not. Only a very tiny fraction of bitcoin's market cap comes from actual usage as a currency. For altcoins it is probably even less. Of ethereum, I don't really know of any real usage that is not itself related to anything gambling, speculating, or betting like. Monero recently got some usage on dark markets, but that must be a tiny fraction of the monero market cap.
As all properties of the behaviour of cryptocurrencies only matter for people using them for real, we shouldn't really be surprised that - given the fact that they are not used much - these properties do not matter much.