Pecunia non olet, your Majesty.
I advise your advisory board to be more agnostic and less judgmental, instead letting the market decide desirability of and assign legitimacy to coins.
4,500 BTC worth of Feathercoin changed hands today. Why let BTC-E alone reap those trading fees? Because of the 'ZOMG PUMP&DUMP SCAMCOIN' FUD common to all altcoins? That harms my interest as a shareholder and I object.
You make a good point. From a business standpoint, we would be missing out on those high volumes. From the point of this thread also, we should be coming to it without prejudice.
Megacoin, despite being open-source as well, faces the exact same charges of premining and other forms of bad-faith. It has excelled regardless, now with a market cap of $45 million.
MEC has only very recently had its huge (200x) price increase. With an absence of any explanation of news that might have caused this, I find it concerning. It looks like a pump, in which case it will likely collapse to previous values and be among the masses once more.
If Litecoin has a glorious future so does its little sister Feathercoin. Just as Litecoin is a backup for Bitcoin, Feathercoin provides Litecoin with hot swappable redundancy.
I just checked which cryptocoin clients I have installed. Only BTC, LTC and FTC. When I first jumped in, I absolutely agreed with you. Also, a more business-like approach to a coin is not in itself necessarily a negative; just innovation.
I would like there to be more transparency over FTC's activities though. Regardless, based on your eloquent argument I therefore hereby retract the blanket ban and will allow FTC to be judged on its merits.
As Ciphertrade's large marking budget attests, there's nothing wrong with commercial backing. Play time is over; the adults are arriving.
Megacoin's success springs from the same factors lifting Feathercoin: attention to translations, services, community, ease-of-use, aesthetics, and yes, marketing.
So there is real backing behind MEC? That changes my view since it ticks the #2 requirement. I'd like to understand more about it though since, like FTC, I don't think there is room for another LTC-based/pure scrypt coin.
If Feathercoin is PNG at Ciphertrade, Megacoin must be for the exact same #REASONS.
And so my vote changes to Quarkcoin, in order to sidestep this rabbit hole for the time being.
Hah!
Well that's +1 for Quark, bringing it to 3. FTC to 2 and MEC to 1. I'll edit the OP with some stats
All hail Queen CipherKate of Bitopia!
/em smiles benevolently at her wards and subjects