Altcoins are growing like gremlins these days, and frankly this non-sense is not helping the greater cause at all.
"BUT competition is healthy!" you might hear some say. Competition is not always healthy, especially not when one small fringe niche is cannibalizing itself instead of trying to get widespread adoption. Cryptocoins at this early stage behaves very much like a natural monopoly.
Definition of natural monopoly:
A natural monopoly by contrast is a condition on the cost-technology of an industry whereby it is most efficient (involving the lowest long-run average cost) for production to be concentrated in a single firm.
Everything from network hashrate, to keeping the technology simple for mass public and newbies, to merchant adoption, to becoming a legit currency all suggest that at this point we should only have one cryptocurrency. Having many competitors detracts important resources and attributes from Bitcoin, and I dont need to remind anyone here that without Bitcoin none of these altcoins would be worth squat.
So lets get Bitcoin into the mainstream first, then we can afford the luxury of making tweaks and alternate coins.