The biggest problem is that blockchains are insanely expensive to secure.
Maybe once ASICs can be ordered right off the shelf you could figure on buying massive massive quantities of hashing power, spend a few millions on ASICs and once you have close to 50% of the hashing power of bitcoin, launch a new coin, making it merged mine able so your ASICs can secure it while still also securing (and raking in) bitcoins, namecoins, devcoins, groupcoins, ixcoins, i0coins, coiledcoins and geistgeld.
-MarkM-
That's a very good take--never thought of it that way. Do you know of a merged mining pool that offers geistgeld along with the others? I really prefer SHA526 coins over scrypt anyway as my cards simply run cooler and faster mining it.
The problem for pools is the lack of free open source software for divvying up secondary-chain coins.
I have a p2pool at dvcstable01.devcoin.org:10332 that merges all the coins, but p2pool only pays out the bitcoins, so right now the best I can do is present it as a zero-fee bitcoin pool.
If the mining profitability sites are correct such a pool should actually be able to pay out 105% to 110% of the bitcoins people mine, but although there is a bounty offered by the DeVCoin project for tools to which a pool operator can give a bunch of coins and tell the tool to divvy them up to miners in proportion to the number of bitcoins p2pool gave the miners there is not yet a tool a pool operator can use to send out the extra earnings.
I eventually want to run at least two pools using such a tool, the current one, being devcoin-oriented, would send the miners their bonus in devcoins, a second one would send out the bonus as bitcoins.
Basically the pool operator would sell the secondary-chain coins for whatever type of coin (s)he plans to pay the bonus with, take whatever fee the pool needs to pay its hosting and bandwidth and operator-salary or whatever, and send out the bonus.
Actually expanding p2pool to be able to actually track and send out all the various altcoins would be a big programming-job.
The code that mmpool at Bitparking uses is not free open source as far as I know so thus far if you want the actual coins of the secondary chains you have to merged-mine yourself or use mmpool which only gives you a few of the types of secondary chain coins.
The DeVCoin project is offering bounties for a tool to divvy up coins to send to p2pool miners in proportion to the number of bitcoins p2pool sent them, because the plan is to pay miners in devcoins some bonus over and above the 100% of the bitcoins. But so far the only tool for divvying up secondary chain coins themselves seems to be the proprietary code used by bitparking for mmpool.
Though of course given the generic (pick a coin to send as bonus) tool the DeVCoin project has put bounties on, a pool operator could if they chose send out one bonus per type of coin, paid in that type of coin, if there were some way to link a user of p2pool to their various addresses for various other chains. Some users do not even like having the devcoins bonus sent to their bitcoin address because they dislike having to export their bitcoin address from a bitcoin wallet and import it to their devcoin wallet. In principle the same bitcoin address can be converted to any other coin, so the same thing could be done for any other coin, but, with devcoin addresses the form of the address when displayed for humans actually looks like the exact same bitcoin address, whereas for other coins it would not look the same so would be additionally confusing. (Refusing to let people use one address for all currencies is a big problem with blockchain based currencies, Ripple nicely fixed that in Ripple so we will see whether in reality users find RIpple's same address for all currencies approach more or less useful/confusing than the blockchain coin family's insistence on making users deal with different address for almost all blockchains...)
-MarkM-