Real altcoins can stand on their own with the help of the team behind them because they are motivated to do so and most importantly they are legit projects who really wanted to make some new kind of service in the crypto industry. as we know, we already witnessed huge numbers of projects who are like that and so far, they are successful and still ongoing today. Unless those projects are good only in the start but in reality, they have hidden agenda to scam people and we know when greed takes over the team, the project will fail and we know it already happened to some projects that we thought were legit.
I disagree, all they’re doing is basically:
...it would have to be better in some way other than just "I started the new chain, so I've got a lot of the easy-to-generate-at-the-beginning-coins."
You say that now, but if bitcoin really takes off I can see lots of get-rich-quick imitators coming on the scene: gitcoin, nitcoin, witcoin, titcoin, shitcoin... Some of them are sure to attract users with promises like "Why use bitcoin, where you can only generate 50 bitcoins every few months? Use shitcoin instead, and you'll get 51 shitcoins every 2 minutes".Of course the cheap imitators will disappear as quickly as those 1990s "internet currencies" like flooz and beenz, but lots of people will get burned along the way.
It’s funny that it was foreseen in 2010 already.
Blend out the promises they make first, and then just look at the monetary properties they offer, and it becomes clear they’re way inferior to Bitcoin. An altcoin can start out good and with well intentions, but if immutability isn’t there you can’t guarantee how long this is the case. It’s like taking a gamble that you can’t influence.
And that’s what separates Bitcoin from all of them. If they don’t even make sense from an economic point of view, then what makes you think they have global adoption potential? Beware of empty hype.
