Like others have said, first mover advantage. Also its an effort reward equation.
For moderate effort one can make a new currency, the rewards if it takes off could be massive. Cost of creating the new currency is low compared to the potential rewards.
Topic: Why so many alt coins? (Read 1471 times)
People can't make up their mind 
the more the better - ony shows how bitcoin itself is the best choice
Peoples trying to make money quickly.
People want to earn Money easily.
Title should be why so many shitcoins
What is lacking is a bit of innovation.. Right now there is only scrypt/sha256/scrypt-jane...
Would love to see another coin with some original proof-of-work-scheme...
Just my 2 cents...
Would love to see another coin with some original proof-of-work-scheme...
Just my 2 cents...
Most won't survive but I like that they all have competition.
People are all trying to cash in on any market they can get their hands on... Why do we need more than once social network..?!?! Its just evolution and who can do it better 
It brings variety to the Bitcoin forums. Come on, some altcoins can be fun and exciting.
Ya, I dont like that much alt coins too. It probably is because people missed out on being early adopters of bitcoin and they wanna become early adopters of their own alt-coins, hoping the value will increase someday.
I agree, we only need GLDCoin.
does not make sense to me...
Why not only one world currency? (I think you can read my sarcasm lol)
Don't underestimate the first mover advantage, which Bitcoin most certainly has:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage
cuz everybody wishes they could go back in time and mine bitcoins at difficulty=1 so hence all the alt coins. plus it lets hobbyers cpu mine some coins. its still worthless but more fun to see 1 bongocoin rather than .00000001 BTC after a days mining
Be careful, if the .gov can show your intent was to get in, hype it to create a bubble, get out, and let it die - they can prosecute you on fraud.
Free market does not give the right to intentionally scam the naive and there are existing laws in place in most countries.
Free market does not give the right to intentionally scam the naive and there are existing laws in place in most countries.
It's called a free market 
I'm all for free, but without any limitations (as it is now), its nothing but chaos. However, it's still up to the miner to decide which one they should "invest" in I guess. Who knows, one of these "shit" coins might turn up bigger than anything we've seen. Stranger things have happened.
There are a lot of recent altcoins, because people can start new coins by simply changing some parameters in the code for an existing client and create a new altcoin. Altcoin releases used to be less frequent and typically involved bigger deviations from each other, but now...
People like alt coins thats the short answer.
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