With BTC taking hit with bad news lately and free falling in price, I wanted to see people's opinion on which coin is going to take off in 2014. I need your advise to diversify my portfolio. Thanks in advance for your help!
The coins that enjoy at least partially the security (hashing power) that, if they did not exist, bitcoin alone would be paying for.
Either that, or anything that does not depend upon proof of work.
The reasoning here is that proof of work is an insanely, exorbitantly expensive means of securing a distributed ledger, but merged mining permits that vast massive cost to be shared among many chains, thus the chains merged alongside bitcoin save a fortune in overhead expense of securing themselves and also bitcoin itself gets possibly at least some small help toward paying the massive cost of proof of work due to its miners being able to be at least partially subsidised by the transaction fees and/or block rewards they obtain in the secondary chains they merge alongside bitcoin.
Thus bitcoin and the coins merged alongside it have a security advantage over chains that cannot be merged mined along with them and/or an expenses advantage in having access to less expensive security to secure themselves.
By investing in coins merged mined alongside bitcoin you are not financing the fragmenting of the hashing power that secures bitcoin but, rather, might actually still be at least partially financing bitcoin's own security even while diversifying into other coins.
Furthermore in the longer term as bitcoin's block rewards shrink, subsidising its miners by means of merged mining could help motivate miners to secure the bitcoin blockchain aka to mine bitcoins, so helping to ensure the success of the members of its merged mined family of coins could be long term beneficial for bitcoin.
-MarkM-
