I was just thinking, most new projects i.e the altcoins we have today are really not bringing anything new to the table other than enriching the devs themselves, who have these projects milking the life(value) out of established coins like bitcoin which could be the cause of been bearish or the extra load that's slowing bitcoin from going to the moon.
So what could be the long term effect of having more altcoins on the market, will they help build or break bitcoin?
Could exchanges play a major role in ensuring shitcoins don't get to see daylight to protect coins that are established to grow?
Alt-coins slow the growth of bitcoin.
People invest in alt coins, hoping that they will moon. They will for early adopters in very solid projects, but that is almost impossible to predict and very, very rarely the case. Most of the time they will rise factors faster than bitcoin, and then fall factors faster than bitcoin. Many of them start with higher percentages of the initial investors having stake, who will invariably cash out, crashing their projects. Other will have what seemed like solid principles that turned out to not be solid at all. Most of these will crash, causing those who needed "their moon" but were too leveraged from crashing as well. The access to these is often through bitcoin, which pumps bitcoin's price initially, and then drops it as they move to other currencies. The funds that would have been invested in bitcoin are then lost to a different system.
Will alt-coins break bitcoin?
No. How can they? Cryptocurrencies rely on market recognition initially. Bitcoin simply has more recognition, and that only increases with time. Bitcoin can crash in price, but markets run on belief. Bitcoin has that. Ethereum is getting recognition, but it runs into many of the same problems in limited transactions, and a small group of enriched investors (from what I understand). A major reason why bitcoin cannot crash as low as alt-coins is because previous investors -- over the past decade+ -- are a potentially a large group with high reserves to buy at low prices. The opposers of bitcoin often refer to the "greater fool theory", not realizing that a greater fool can be a single individual/group who can operate at both high and low prices.
Decentralization improves robustness
Shitcoins also prevent bitcoin from being singly attacked in whatever form by providing additional forms of decentralization. Philosophical attacks have to deal with someone defending with "but
has feature that fixes ". In that sense, shitcoins defend the bitcoin network. Eventually someone will come up with a decent shitcoin that will compete with bitcoin. Ethereum is likely to go through its troubles when it looks to surpass bitcoin.
Shitcoins are the future
Bitcoin is the future. But shitcoins are too. They will follow behind bitcoin, becoming a new form of stock in a company or providing additional services. Bitcoin will remain king as the primary financial mechanism has to remain "pure" of these "developments" and prove robustness instead of utility. Utilities come and go with new generational technologies, but underlying finances last a lot longer. In that sense, shitcoins matter, but not nearly as much, not unless someone can come up with a much more pure use-case.