Did the network hashrate dropped too?
Yup... big time. Something's definitely up. I like to think of it as the silence before the storm and what not, but I get this feeling people are giving up on mining and overall investing in mining hardwares. Bitcoin scares are at an all time high now... the idea is now being associated with "losing money" and "scam", etc. where I live. There's also the issue about too many coins out there, each with its patriotic "tribe", not very different from ours so the hashes spread out thin...
Dude I bet with you, when all the Scrypt-Asics are delivered this summer, the difficulty is in the 1000s, lots of retailers accept DopeCoin and one DOPE is being traded at over 10.000 satoshis you'll keep bumping your head onto the keyboard that you sold this early and didnt mine more when the difficulty was this low, the big reward is only for the faithful holder and supporters. This is a longtherm project, remember, every good company doesnt make profit in the beginning at all, look at Twitter, Facebook, ICQ, Skpe and WhatsApp.
Besides that you are totally right that the market is being flooded with lots of new Altcoins everyday, which are more or less the same, looking at the algorithm, all slightly modified clones of Litecoin. You dont need to be a coder to start a new coin, as there is simple prefabricated software every noob can start a coin with.
Scrypt is faster, resistant to transaction malleability and Asics, thus more democratic and better to use, but still coin Nr.1 is SHA-256.
But thats not what it is about as we could see with DogeCoin, to make a coin successful, it is about the community, spreading, usage and image of the coin.
Scrypt is faster, resistant to transaction malleability and Asics, thus more democratic and better to use, but still coin Nr.1 is SHA-256.
When LiteCoin recovers its Gox-induced long-time-low the AltCoins will move too.
Mark my words and see what I said yesterday;
Bitcoin went more then 100 Bucks up today on Bitstamp and BTC-E.