Bitcoin Forum

I believe cryptocurrencies are the future but I'm having trouble deciding where to mine each night when I go to sleep.  I'm not interested in using a "revenue" calculator to decide what to mine because I'm mining my coins to hold for the foreseeable future except maybe a few to gamble here and there when I get the itch.  Anyways the question that I ask myself and what I'd like to hear from people smarter than me (you guys) is what separates alt coin X from the rest of the pack?

In my opinion the most important features of a coin are its' innovative features, network power, developer support, and merchant support.  While all of these are important I feel like developer support is the most crucial for long-term success.  Yes, merchant support is necessary for wide-scale adoption and the network needs to be strong/distributed enough to hold up to a 51% attacks but without proper developer support nothing really matters, IMO.  I look back at some of the coins that have been released in the past few months and pity the folks who wasted good hashing power on a coin whose developer hasn't made a post since they announced the coin or hasn't been seen for months.

Miners - What are you guys mining and why?
Developers - What separates your coin?

EDIT:  Before I get jumped on for not using a revenue calculator to decide what to mine each night then converting to my preferred alt coin I consider the lost revenue worth the cost of sticking with my preferred coin to keep my preferred network stronger by contributing my hashing power.

Primecoin because it has the potential to be useful.

http://litepool.eu/lebowskis

Lebowskis the only coin you should mine!

If you are holding some bitcoins now,
you could be interested with other kinds of coins.
But you don't have to hold them.

Even BTC has lots of problems.
Say nothing of other coins.

In fact, lots of persons know about BTC,
but just a few of them would really hold BTC.
Don't be too serious.

Just play it.   8)

Spots can be traded for gold and silver soon

This thread will be all the people holding lots of coins though to just post that one

You really have to decide this yourself.  It is a bit like investing in startup companies and you have to do your research if you want to have a chance of picking something successful.  Look at the person behind the coin, read through their posts do they sound professional?, intelligent? capable of creating something more than a copy. Look at the coin itself - Name, block size, block time, amount of coins, the distribution of coins over time and decide what you believe will work best.  The price rises when demand exceeds supply so there needs to be continued development to drive demand.  I feel some people have fallen in to the trap of thinking because a coin has a lower mintage it is going to be more valuable. 

I agree that low quantities lulled people into some worthless alts and would also add unrealistically low transaction times to the list of bad things to look at when deciding where to invest your time.  While some of these faster networks have yet to have a major hiccup they just don't have the transaction volume to give me the confidence they can handle being a mainstream currency.  For this reason I choose to mainly mine Litecoins when I sleep and give some of the new alts a few hours during the day when I'm surfing the web.

A coin where there is less circulation like CGB because it will continue to increase in value as it is rare

QuantumCoin, you can even use your CPU to mine it ;)

http://quantumcoin.org/

rare does not equal valuable.