Had an opportunity to preach on alt coins quite a bit at the Inside Bitcoin convention in NY City. Met lots of Bitcoin purists who just had no taste for alternative coins and plenty of alt coin lovers all with great and unique ideas.
A few altcoins were well represented at the conference eMunie had a booth on the floor, DOGE coin (of course), Bitshares folks, Florincoin just to name a couple of them.
Figured I would share why I think Altcoins are important to Bitcoin. Altcoins are a grand experiment a giant lab where tweaks and changes to the blockchain give live (mostly) working examples of how a blockchain can work under different conditions.
Why this is good is it shows us ways Bitcoin can if needed adapt and change. Let’s take the androidtokens 2.0 or the protoshares snapshot for example. Both are unique ways to completely abandon a chain and begin on a new algorithm new chain while users retain their holdings. Now whether or not you agree with how it was done the fact that they accomplished it shows that Bitcoin itself could if needed do something similar.
DOGE coin is an amazing example of a coin that I for one discounted early on but now find very intriguing. Not because of its innovation but its community. DOGE has made crypto hip. I think many see Bitcoin as a computer nerd or investors game right now and it is hard to get folks interested unless you talk numbers. While DOGE many in that community only know about crypto because of the coin name and meme. Pretty soon we will have a NASCAR driving around the track at Talladega
http://gas2.org/2014/04/09/dogecoin-nascar-livery-chosen-much-black . Like it or not this is VERY powerful. The Bitcoin community could learn from this example.
Rather than ramble on and on figure I’ll see if others have some good examples of how altcoins might help drive Bitcoins future. Maybe we will get a productive thread going
Yes this thread will be moderated so try to keep it on topic and productive. 
