Xc is a train wreck. Shadow is a train wreck apparently waiting to happen. Every time it's the same story. New hyped coin comes out. You tell people don't buy into this nonsense, no one listens. After a few weeks/months, the projects become unhinged, and everyone wonders what the fuck happened. Eventually they take their losses and move on to the next hyped coin.
So what do you suggest? and don't tell me bitcoin - as far as I'm concerned, market-wise, it's behaving like every other pump-and-dump altcoin these days.
Bitcoin has the absolute most potential (not percentage wise, but market cap wise.) It has the biggest adoption, the most developers, the most exchanges, and it's accepted by many large retailers and e-tailers. It's also the primary currency all altcoins are traded against and quite a few millionaires and billionaires own small pieces of it. (ie. Bill Miller, Winklevoss twins, etc.) That doesn't mean it's impossible to have its role usurped by a cryptocurrency with superior technology, but for now, it's the main cryptocurrency, with altcoins relegated to smaller roles. (ie. anonymity, different features for the corporate world, smart contracts, social aspects, etc..) Altcoins as a whole have been falling in comparison to bitcoin for months, but that could certainly change, especially if bitcoin starts generating headlines again and investors are looking for greater risk/reward than bitcoin offers.
For having a stable, solid developer and decent innovation through ups and downs over a decent amount of time (for the altcoin world) and having relatively low marketcaps, I like Reddcoin and Blackcoin. I haven't looked much into NXT and peercoin because of their marketcaps.
For altcoins with possible corporate/various market uses, I like ethereum (not yet tradeable), syscoin, and, depending on how it's implemented and marketed, timebank. I haven't looked much into counterparty and viacoin, but people seem to see potential in those as well.
For small cap anonymous coins, I like Sonic (SSD) most because of the steganography aspect, marketcap, and dev.
For having some adoption, I prefer dogecoin to litecoin as it has 1/6 litecoin's market cap and seems to have more active members, but litecoin does have far higher trading volume and a hard cap on coins.
Bitmark is a mid-level marketcap coin with a unique feature that could do well depending on adoption, sorting out current mining, etc.
TRI is a very small marketcap coin that is one to keep an eye on, in my opinion.
