When a coin is most profitable to mine... you are actually too late. When you want to make money with limited hashing power Always mine 0-day coins. How stupid their names are, or how silly/limited their announcement is.
Always look at the launch, it should not be pre-mined too much. A little for giveaways is ok, to attract attention to the coin. When a launch goes bad by DDOS attacks they are probably doing this themselves so they can pre-mine after launch. In my opinion one of the demands of [Suspicious link removed]hould be that all coin announcement should be pre-announced to give everyone an honest chance. But hey... who am i. If a launch should go bad they should re-launch it another time. But this almost never happens.
Most coin-devs want to mine a lot of coins themselves the first few days, and it's not in their benefit attracting lot's of miners bringing to diff up too soon. What they do is make a fast , small announcement without much graphics or any other fancy stuff. Then after a few days they edit the post and make it more attractive so many miners will mine, pump up the diff. And then the dev (and the first day miners) can dump the coins on the first exchange it hits.
99.9% of all coins are not made for a longer period of a few months. What also happens is that they let the coin die, let all people sell their coins for peanuts and buy all the coins, and then jumpstart the coin again after a few weeks (like a re-launch) and then sell it when it's worth something.
There are very little announcements for coins that are actually going to be worth something in the future. If i would make a guess i would say the Ron Paul Coin (since Ron Paul will run for president if he can, and he has spoken positive about the RPC) and the DGB (digibyteCoin that has a lot's of devs and really tries to make it a coin with Merchants).
Hope this helps.
Edit: Something i forgot:
Most launches are done by devs that have an account not much older then a month. This is because they use new accounts to launch new coins everytime the old coin is dead. It's just left dead when pumped & dumped.
The only coin that has real value is Bitcoin like someone below said. This is because you can actually do/buy something with this coin. Most (almost all) Altcoins are just ways to get more Bitcoins, not to compete against it.
+1 really cleaver and usefull answer. Many thanks to you.
A lot of interesting things in your post !
A new "honest" coin should be:
- not too much premined
- not under DDOS attacks or suspiciously overmined at launch (aka pleased to be mined at low difficulty)
- clearly announced from launch with all required fancy stuff and broad communication
- must not be a pure carbon copy of the-coin-the-same-guys-launched-one-week-ago
- build to last more than a few months (for example some innovation within the source code should demonstrate a dev team is present and truly involved)
One could say that a good new coin should smell sweat at launch! Honest things must always smell sweat (at least a little )
Are you yourself involved with RPC or DGB ?
Take a look at MRC - Microcoin, it has fair mining over a year, and can shoot later high. Its price ridiculously low atm, so you may buy or mine it.