We know which coin came first, and second. And about a year ago there was an expansion in the number of coins, both SHA & Scrypt.
The expansion accelerated in Q4 2013, and we know some, possibly many, will fail. Some may have already failed even though they don't know it yet.
I believe some, possibly many, of the alts will succeed. But, success will not come easy or without significant effort. For an alt to succeed, significant effort on multiple fronts will be required, from hashing power, community, merchants, exchanges (like coinbase & Bitpay more so than cryptsy) and individuals committed to going out and convincing the people in these areas to embrace their alt. A measure of financial backing may prove necessary for the team charged with said promotions. Posting on twitter is great for name recognition, but if that is all you have, I suggest revising your plan. A dedicated people and fans is great, but a deep organization and a lot of hard work will be required.
Which coins do you know to have some or all of these aspects in place and or teams in the process of making these things happen?
I'm not looking for the largest fan base, or the most popular. I want to know which ones really have some meet on their bones so to speak, regardless of their current popularity, difficulty level, or hash rate.
Thank you for your wisdom
I think you already see the main issues here at hand, that in the end it will require some significant investment in organizations run by experts in the field to make the bitcoin technology viable on a larger scale.
The current community driven model especially in the altcoin space is a kind of testbed for technologies and marketing strategies.
So there is some value here in improving security of the software and experiment with possible adoption scenarios.
If you look at the development of Linux, it was a small group of developers that pulled off the initial development without getting paid, but now there are corporations behind it to drive the further adoption and development. Grass root initiatives are a first step in the evolution of a new technology, but only a first step.
Without the mining aspect of the bitcoin technology certainly we would have seen a much different adoption path.
Giving the tokens of exchange (the coins) an intrinsic value has pulled away the focus and efforts from the core bitcoin technology towards the mining aspect. A lot of effort and money is spent on refining the mining aspect, because this is where the money is made.
So the incentive is not in improving the transaction networks and making them more usable per se. The incentive is in mining and to some degree the miners are interested in keeping the machine going.
I would say greater than 90% of the people would not be here if there would be no mining and no money to be made. Maybe the figure is closer to 99%.
I think the bitcoin technology itself could be a huge step in the right direction freeing us from the centralized manipulated monetary systems that are on the verge of collapse all over the world.
Still I fear I am saying this in an environment of people with their minds poisoned with greed who have forgotten their responsibility for the society as a whole.
Titan
