NEM is the best tech, but I'd pick Ardor because it's trading at a lower market cap and a competitor to ETH that's better scalable. Ardor has one of the most attractive market depths on poloniex right now, with plenty of buy limit orders in place, showing plenty of demand. Ardor was made from scratch by the NXT team, and includes child chain technology which will make is more scalable than ETH.

Burst is a one trick pony... using hard drive space is interesting, but that seems to be the only thing the coin has going for it.  BitAsean is a gimmick really.. you don't need a currency for a specific region.. any currency can be traded in any country.

Coins I like not on your list...

PascalCoin... blockchain trim technology, where account numbers hold your balance and the transaction data gets trimmed, resulting in a relatively small max blockchain size, along with enhanced anonymity since transaction data eventually gets trimmed. 85% of all the coins trading are held in poloniex's wallet right now (account number 86646-64)

Xtrabytes... static node technology where each node confirms the transaction

Syscoin.. has various features including a version of blockchain trim and has been under gradual development for some time. A relatively mature platform.

VIACoin... it's LTC on steroids.. under active development working in segwit and lightning network with some big whales behind it.

Ark

Bitbay

Shit.. I mean Shift (yes I own this one)

Irrationality is a matter of perspective. Cryptos are still a relatively small market from a global economic perspective. From a technical standpoint it's in a bubble, but all the new investment money creates a sort of unknown factor.  A lot of altcoins are being actively developed with unique tech so it makes sense that the wealth from bitcoin and ETH would trickle down and affect the altcoins.  Combined with the problems getting miners to agree to progress, and it's just simple healthy competition and speculation. That's all I'm going to say about it.

Come up with some great ideas and present them. If you make a coin, do a NEM style stake distribution and not an ICO.  Distribute stakes for no cost, keep 5-10% for yourself, and if your efforts pay off the coin will go up in value.

There's already lots of great projects out there so you have your work cut out for you.

Some unique ones... xtrabytes... static nodes that each verify the transaction

PascalCoin... accounts and blockchain trim which allows a manageable blockchain size

Bitbay... using the blockchain to auction and sell items

Ardor... based off NXT, developing tech called "child chains" that allow better scalability. Offers tokens like ETH.

NEM... written from scratch, though also inspired by NXT, developing a scalable blockchain tech known as "mijin" which could eventually be the next big thing. This platform is fairly mature.

Syscoin... also has a version of blockchain trim tech, along with a number of other things. Been under steady development for some time now. Fairly mature compared to a lot of platforms out there.

Then there's coins that offer decentralized storage, VPNs, tons that offer smart contracts, etc. etc. etc.

How will your coin stand out?   Ultimately working on scalability first I believe is the best idea... but I don't know what you could bring to the table that's not already here. Maybe join an existing project.

ICO market will subside when the bubble bursts, just like the IPO market subsides during economic downturns.  Most of them are garbage with promises they won't keep as they take their millions and run.  Nobody needs these tokens. Even though I went a bit into WAGERR, I don't believe anyone will actually use it on any large scale to ever gamble with.

Given ETH can't even handle the load of these tokens, future ETH based token ICOs seem questionable. Time to work on scalability first.. see which coin get it done the fastest.  NEM and Ardor are my guesses.. Ardor could replace ETH as the token king.. time will tell. Tech based on NXT is right now the most advanced, in my opinion. Thus I'm holding some (not much) of my original NEM stake while the rest is invested in Ardor and various altcoins.

Though there's a few smaller projects like Pascal that have some novel technology. Blockchain trim is a big deal. I'm amazed that one sits there dead as a doornail.

There's no point sitting in a thread on a coin one doesn't own and continually bashing it over the course of months. When I sell all my coin, I simply stop talking about it and focus on something else. It just makes sense. Why this guy sits here trolling this coin, while stewie trolls HEAT is beyond me. Seriously, move on if you don't own any. Why waste your time and mine having to read your crap?   News flash... 95% of all coins are pumped garbage.. I could make the case that 99% of them are, but that would cut into my profits.   Another amazing revelation.. the only reason bitcoin has value over other coins is because people give it value.  There are 1000 other altcoins that can do the same thing.

What altcoins do you hold that are so much better than this one? Do you invest in the tech, or just invest for the pump and then dump them?

We need to stay in this channel to keep from having a major correction, or perhaps a bubble burst. The fact we did not surpass the previous high made around June 12, but rather made a double top (technically it's a triple top)  is somewhat bearish. Now we're in a cup and handle formation and we could go either way, though I'm worried that way will be down because of that double top.  If we do sell off, it will be a pretty hard selloff, and will happen likely within 48 hours. If we can rally up and surpass the previous double top, we should have a bull that continues and give us a nice surge higher to 130+ billion. If I was a betting man, I would bet the bearish route, but I hope I'm wrong.  Positive news includes more than 80% of miners for bitcoin signaling segwit, with bearish news being the problems ETH is having, which couldn't have come at a worse time. Hopefully people rotate out of ETH and into Ardor, ETH's main competition,  or other altcoins and not to cash or tether.

The hunt for the most scalable coins continues.. NEM, Ardor, Pascal, VIA, to name a few... many have "claims" of hundreds to thousands of transactions per second but this is in a controlled environment, not out in the wild amongst networks. It's not just the transaction speed but also how fast it confirms in real world terms... say a coin can go from your wallet and show up as available in poloniex in under 2 minutes.. that would be the coin to look for.

If I didn't think 75-80% of all trading cryptos were all semi-scammy or manipulated in the same way, I might care more about the claims being made about xtrabytes. Fact is, I don't care, and I'm willing to give them a chance to prove themselves. Besides, a guy I've been messaging is now working on some of the marketing aspects.

Now if I could just convince the Pascal Coin guys to let me help them re-market their coin and remove "coin" from the name. That tech trumps any I've come across so far if he can make it work. Account numbers that allow account balances to be preserved while the oldest transaction data on the blockchain gets "trimmed" resulting in a blockchain that's no larger than 6GB in size. Not only is that scalable, but it's also semi-anonymous... perhaps too anonymous for big businesses who want the paper trail. After all, if old transaction histories get wiped during the trim, the paper trail is gone....

Dare I say 90% of ICOs are pump and dumps that are going nowhere in the long run. That includes WAGERR, the one I put a BTC into.. the whole way they set it up to reward people for investing more into the ICO smelt funny from the start, but it's still better than most of the ICOs I see.

Switch to VIA while it's still trading under $50M.  It has all that stuff you mentioned.

Whatever. Nobody should be required to work much more than 50 hours a week. Life is too short for that shit. Thank goodness for crypto currencies.. it's turned a middle class working stiff into a very comfortable working stiff.   I work rotating 12 hour shifts and have today and tomorrow off. I'm going to enjoy myself!  I try to avoid overtime when I can, which has cost me cash in the past, but none of that matters now, I don't need overtime anymore.  If we had single payer healthcare in the US I'd consider quitting my job to pursue other opportunities, but when you quit a job with good health coverage in the US, you're basically screwed.

I believe in global warming but not blaming everything on climate change. I get tired reading these articles talking about climate change as those it's some sort of concrete fact. No, it's not. Extreme weather has been going on as long as the earth has existed. There's nothing extreme about a drought, tornado outbreak, cold front that brings freezing temps to Florida, higher than average hurricanes, etc. These have always occurred and always will in the US due to the way the jet stream interacts with desert air from the SW, cold air from canada, and warm air from the gulf of mexico...  yes the earth is warming. Yes CO2 levels are higher. These are documented facts. Climate "change" is not.

In any case, most people want warmer weather anyways. There's a reason FL is so populated. Who's to say what the global temperature should be? Maybe another 5 degrees would be a net benefit being so much of our landmass is in arctic areas (Canada, Russia, northern Europe)

innovation, quality products.. I try to buy made in USA, Germany, or Japan when possible.

I held out longer than anyone wearing watches, then one day I just stopped. Like all habits, I eventually developed workarounds.. looking at my phone, the computer monitor, at a clock somewhere... eventually the instinctive urge to stare at my now empty wrist faded away.

Laws are only useful if people follow them. Just how do they intend to prevent people from buying BTC?  I'm torn as there's part of me that understands order is necessary, and the animal part of me (that I suppose is part of everyone) that wishes there was anarchy when  I'm sitting pointlessly at a stoplight when there's no traffic around.. the internal battle of fighting what is versus accepting what you can't or shouldn't try to change...  having freedom versus having nannies that want to control our lives from cradle to grave to protect us from ourselves, and the happy medium we live in.... why should these nannies tell me I can't go if I'm sitting at a red light and there's no traffic around and it's safe? Why must I drive so damn slow because some government official decided what the speed limit should be when it's bright, sunny outside, and a sunday afternoon and there's no traffic on the road? Part of personal development work is giving up the need to control everything, the neurotic need...

With daily volume of $500K or more per day, there's no way it gets delisted. I'm surprised it's trading as cheap as it is right now. Granted as I've mentioned numerous times it would be nice if they dropped "coin" from the name, but it's not a dealbreaker.

Thank you for the recommendations. Picked up some SYS. Price is good, nice consolidation level after a recent rise, a nice block was for sale at 8500 sats, so I didn't even bother with a limit order.  I see they have their own version of blockchain trimming tech that is a bit different, and I was impressed with the ongoing development over the course of the last 2-3 years along with the presentation. Good to diversify.  Clearly a more mature platform than a lot of the coins out there.. cough.. dogeshit.. cough.

I came to the revelation recently that PASC with it's blockchain trimming tech has inherit privacy advantages. With the account number system, all the transaction balances are maintained, but the transaction history is periodically trimmed to maintain a max blockchain size. With old transactions gone and no paper trail after a certain period of time, you essentially have an untraceable balance. With only a 10M market cap and a talented active programmer who has put out a good version 2 whitepaper and it already trades on poloniex, to me it's a no brainer. There's also the side hobby of auctioning off rare or desired account numbers to the highest bidder.

https://github.com/PascalCoin/PascalCoin/blob/master/PascalCoinWhitePaperV2.pdf

I also hold a bunch of VIA, Bitbay, Shift, Xtrabytes, Ark, Ardor, and NEM. Did I miss one? Oh yeah.. blackcoin.   Not all of them have super tech, but they all have promise given their market caps. I can't possibly post all the pros and cons in each one, or to say I'm not going to waste my time doing so. Do your own DD and decide if they're worth your time.

I will say.. Ardor is competition for ETH, and NEM is competition for BTC and Ripple.  

It just occurred to me that this blockchain trim tech has inherit privacy advantages.. if the account information remains intact but the paper trail gets trimmed from time to time, that means transaction history eventually gets removed. That is quite possibly the most promising tech when it comes to anonymous transactions that I've come across yet.  By the time the government gets around to trying to trace the history, the history is trimmed.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, this tech could be used to store information about people like their identity, medical information, etc. while maintaining a max blockchain size. Each individual would get their own unique account number, and the information contained in it (besides the account balance) would be encrypted. That would be useful as well.  There would, however, be no paper trail of this information going back to day one. If that's what the government or other organization using the tech wants, they'd have to use the conventional blockchain tech for that.

I'm not worried who's investing in what.. outside the mediocre name this is some of the best tech out there trading at stupid low prices. Unlike Xtrabytes, this one has an in-depth white paper and well laid out website.  It actually presents a good argument for preserving proof of work, as well.. for you mining whales.

Disclosure: Long PASC and XBY

That's neat... and I DO think it's a good idea to identify everyone on the planet. The only reason someone would value "privacy" is if they were into illegal activities, granted I support people's right to engage in illegal activities when they are what I call "victimless crimes" like speeding, smoking pot, and the like.   It had me thinking of Pascal Coin and the account number system... a trimmable blockchain technology where everyone can have a unique account number that's exclusive to them where their basic identity and medical data can be stored, along with perhaps things like their bank account balance... all on the blockchain, with a size limit that's manageable due to the blockchain trim tech.. that would be neat. Of course pascal's tech doesn't have enough account numbers to generate the numbers needed for whole countries.. I'm sure they could scale to fit the needs though.  There's plenty of numbers to track refugees though.

At some point the ever expanding blockchain sizes will need to be addressed, which is why I focus on investing in the tech versus another generic coin that promises "smart contracts" and the like.. right now child chains (Ardor) and Blockchain Trim (Pascal) are promising. If anyone else has coins with great tech I might be missing please post. I like to diversify.  There has been other scalability threads but nothing exciting has come of them.

The one disadvantage of Pascal's tech is that you have to be paying attention to what you're doing.. you can't go and dispute a year old transaction because at some point transaction history gets "trimmed" to keep the blockchain at a max size. The information in the account remains the same, while the data which got the account to that point eventually get trimmed, inotherwords, so there is no complete paper trail that goes straight back to day one. It will go back 3 to 6 months and then your paper trail is gone. Actually that has advantages when it comes to privacy.. hmm.... (puts on thinking cap)

Blockchain trim is the ultimate privacy enhancing tech when I think about it more.. it definitely needs to be promoted! At the speed government moves, by the time they bother to check the blockchain, the history is gone. Very interesting.... 

I put a BTC into WAGERR, but I'll be honest with the amount they're raising I believe most of them are scams taking advantage of the current mania. It reminds me of the IPO craze during the dot com bubble where the insiders would lock in their share purchases at low prices and they'd hit the market up 200% in a day.  This was all well and good until the dot com bubble burst.. then all that went away. Eventually that will happen here. For now, enjoy the ride... let's hope the total market cap can break through the old high.. I'm not ready for a dot com burst yet. I'll give WAGERR credit for having a well done website and professional presentation though, which is something all coins are not the best at (cough.. xtrabyte's new website cough..)

In any case I'm positioned in the coins I expect to perform the best anyways, with my top holdings being NEM, Ardor, and VIA, though honestly I think the ignored Pascal Coin has more potential than any of these from a pure tech perspective combined with low market cap. Account numbers, blockchain trim, what's not to love? (besides the name).. I'm just happy I got my zip code as an account number. The chances of finding that randomly were pretty low.