The more competition, the better.
Market will decide the winner and losers.

It's interesting that NXT is not affected by this recent OpenSSL issue, because it runs on Java. At least that's what developers claim. Oh well, it's not a fork after all, but I just thought I should mention.

yeah such wow, none of which is working

Sentiment is pointing that the bottom is close, but the price can stay at the bottom or slightly bounce back and forth around it for another few months before it takes off again.

What is DigiByte's hashrate right now?

They will detach when media and network effect brings enough users of those altcoins into them. These new users would support enough infrastructure to discover prices of those altcoins gradually in a more independant from bitcoin fashion, especially considering that bitcoin is way overpriced compared to those altcoins but essentially provides the same functions (as Dogecoin) or fewer functions (than NXT). Hence, gradual detachment has to happen.

No nation state will adopt bitcoin officially, ever. You have to be living in a fantasy land to think otherwise. At best it will always be just a complementary currency, although at turbulent (hyper)inflationary times it may take a big share of the market, but again, unofficially. Actually this scenario is very likely, as we see nation states are gearing up for more quantitative easing (aka money printing) in the next years, which should help other forms of currencies to become more popular.

The reason is simple: a nation state wants to control currency issuance, but it's impossible with a decentralized currency. Any fantasy about an attempt to premine a currency and distribute it among the population is utterly stupid for 2 reasons: 1) distributing the currency for free is a stupid form of distribution as it lowers the value, because people only value what they must work for to get, and is prone to massive dumps of that currency; 2) why go through computer 'mining' process they (those who make decisions) don't quite understand if they could just produce any number of traditional digital currency in the form of bank entries with a few mouse-clicks, or print good old bank notes, and reach the same effect.

* For reference: official currency is the one taxes are paid in.

yeah? go tell that to bitcoin processing services for merchants, they require 6 confirmations even for small purchases. That will hurt adoption a lot.

There is no reason to believe it should remain so for a long time, because everything evolves so quickly in the crypto scene these days, so you better start learning about others and analyzing them. 2014 will be an interesting year when some crypto currencies might detach themselves from bitcoin and its price patterns. The first likely candidates are Dogecoin and NXT. Check them out and tell us what you think about them.

Well, do research Dogecoin then and tell us your opinion. You can't analyze Bitcoin properly without looking at other cryptos at the same time. They are all connected.

How about if merged mining is implemented and at the same time both Litecoin and Dogecoin also implement Scrypt-N to make GPU miners happy?

Buy Bitcoin now and quickly convert it to Dogecoin. The latter is so undervalued that possible downside is literally a few satoshi, while potential upside is hundreds of satoshi.

Igorr, what do you think about Dogecoin?

If this move doesn't change the number of DOGE's from current reward schedule (100 bln to the beginning of 2015 and then each block 10 000 doges starting from block 600 000), then sure, why not, it's a good idea to strengthen the security of both coins by merged mining.

The only thing not to mess with is the block reward schedule, because this is the crucial factor for investing, that helps evaluate the potential price of the coin. If the supply of the coins is messed with, and the originally planned supply is changed, that would make any coin a joke (just like fiat is a joke because the future supply can be printed at whim in any quantities if needed) and investors would flee that coin in packs. Cryptos are good and different, because the coin supply increase is known for years ahead. Let's not play with that.

you dumper! 

I'd buy a couple... maybe t-shirts too )

For the sake of simplicity, forget about BCNext. Either it's CfB who is the real BCNext or there is real BCNext but he just disappeared, we don't care. It's enough that CfB says he knows how to implement Transparent Forging in NXT, which can make it to process 100+ tx per second, and which is one the main features of NXT together with Assets Exchange, that's all that matters. And CfB said he will stay longer than 3rd of April, that's all that matters. I haven't seen any working implementation of NEM yet, that's all I know. When there is one and it's better than NXT, I'll be the first to say NEM beats NXT. For now NEM is just vaporware, not a single line of code, nothing to discuss.

NXT released alpha in November, and I don't expect they will deliver a finished product sooner than September, with all the declared features. Moreover, CfB himself said that he's going to make sure he'll deliver in summer, add another month or two to squash bugs to make the software production quality (not alpha or beta quality).

It took bitcoin a few years to become what NXT already is - money transfer mechanism, and they still find bugs in bitcoin, it's still beta. NXT strives for more, to be more than just a crypto money transfer mechanism (see its list of features), I guess NEM strives for more also. There is no magic, and developing software from scratch, debugging it takes a long time. It doesn't matter what NEM 'expects', you have to be realistic about what people can actually deliver.

If NEM just clones NXT, it won't be far behind in features, but behind in adoption.
If NEM codes its own software, not clone NXT, then end of 2014 is a realistic expectation for a more or less finished product.

After the next halvening at the end of April the supply of new coins dumped on the market will diminish significantly + Nascar advertisement, keep accumulating now shibes, May will be interesting (150 satoshi will be established as the floor), June-July even more so (200-250 satoshi), and August-September is when Doge will reach new all time highs and never look back. That's my prediction and I'll make sure I am around to quote it in a few months.

By the end of 2014, when NEM might deliver some finished product, distribution of NXT won't be an issue, as at current low prices a lot of people are buying. They'll be buying even more when Assets Exchange is released (in test net now). I don't see NEM as any meaningful competition of NXT.

You got it all wrong. Smart money is buying, dumb money is selling now