I really hope these coins don't come back, the community really needs to set some standards and discourage scam coins and I'd encourage sal002 to set standards for inclusion of a coin above the technical ability to scrap a price, but rather to limit CoinChoose to coins with dedicated development teams (as in more then one person) who can at the very least put out updates that incorporate BTC updates, no coin can possibly exist long-term without that.
FWIW my own robots don't switch to a coin if there's no exchange with enough bids to sell 20 times my daily production at a profitability above any other coin.
I've not been left with coins to dump at prices a fraction of the advertised price when the miners switched since then.
You should study the rate of orphans too. Coins advertising "near instant payment confirmations" aren't viable at all. For example Worldcoin produces only 52% valid blocks for me.
I'm not entirely sure why some coins have such success too: Litecoin is only 55% as profitable for me as Bitcoin mining when you merge-mine Namecoin/Ixcoin/Devcoin. I'm a little below ideal scrypt profitability (one of my rigs runs Xubuntu 13.04 which I suspect is 15% less efficient on scrypt than 12.04) but even if I fixed this rig I can't even expect to reach 60% currently.
I suspect most people mining scrypt-based coins don't monitor their power consumption and compute its cost...
In the end unless these coins find any use that Bitcoin can't fulfill they are only good for speculation. Even Litecoin the largest of them which promised faster confirmations as an advantage isn't used for any service I know of that could not be (or isn't already) provided with Bitcoin.
