Meh i just had a quick good laugh that you have "fact based cryptocurrency researcher" as part of your signature and the whole article was based on assumptions and opinions. Just funny to me how ironic it was....
Suddenly because my thoughts on Otoh are an opinion, the entire article is an assumption?...
Nice.
I understand you are only protecting yourself. It's not a problem.
I want to mention too I even put in a good word for Viacoin (does Viacoin have any use?). How come no one talks about that?
To be fair, I see and understand a lot of your arguments but they aren't convincing enough to label viacoin as a pump and dump scheme (at least by intention). Development might be a lot of implementing other people's protocol and algorithms but I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing. It depends on if you believe that there should only be btc and litecoin/dash/via shouldn't exist at all as an alternative to the btc. I don't think this is a winner take all market, and I think there is a lot of merit to certain industries and business to have a slightly adjusted btc that could be easier to conform to their business needs later.
I think keeping it close to Bitcoin core gives it a lot of validity in terms of security and btc has shown viability as a currency. I also think that being able to implement certain protocols without having a community argue about it and threatening with forks is also a plus. At this price point, I think it's just a bet on how fast it can implement all the latest crypto standard(segwit, which it has now, lightning network, atomic swap, etc) and then after those, it's seeing how it'll try to differentiate itself. I don't think just anyone could fork btc now, add segwit, lightning network, ledger support just at will. I also don't think it's easy to get into polo, bittrex and hopefully into some mobile wallet like coinomi by making your own fork. thus I see a lot of merit in a relatively low market cap coin that is as secure as btc and flexible enough to adapt to future potential opportunities. At this point it's all speculation anyways, I rather via then say an oversold ICO like the 150 mill tezos imo.
I've diversified myself with coins at each stage of the market cap and via is at least stable, active, active community and so far hasn't had any real pump and dump trends like parkbyte(consistently seeing it + 60%, - 40%).
Maybe I've been lucky and so far got good returns from via and it might not keep going, but that could be said the same about most coins. I could also have gotten more gains with other coins, but hindsight is 20/20.
* on a side note, I agree with having just 1 main mining pool is bad and we're too dependant on f2pool.
** Also otoh seems cool but following the rich doesn't always get you richer.