If a currency is popular but not profitable to mine they're probably going to run out. Anywhere you mine that can pay you your preferred currency but isn't mining that currency is going to have to buy that currency on an exchange, which means that their fees are probably high enough that they can just eat the exchange fee, or they'll somehow charge you the exchange fee.

IMO you'd be better off just picking a currency zpool has a lot of but is easy to exchange to whatever you want to hold.

Though it turns out they just tweeted yesterday that they've restocked LTC: https://twitter.com/_zpool_/status/950091036705153025

Couldn't we use a "seed network" of known-good hosts to prevent this sort of attack entirely? In situations where there is some sort of conflict between chains, a majority of the seed nodes could override what the rest of the network is saying. Worst case, some transactions could end up being reversed - a good reason to put a cap on the value of a single transaction.

To avoid DDoS attacks on the seed nodes themselves, they could avoid being directly connected to the network, passively listening and sending their decisions through a broadcast channel such as USENET. It may be that there doesn't even need to be a network, just a group of people who decide by consensus which of a conflicting set of chains is correct, potentially being able to synthesize a new one to "reboot" the network if things get really bad.

I realize this returns us to the problem of trusted third parties, but since they can't impose any decision without its being accepted by enough Bitcoin users, it's not only far better than bank notes, it seems to be better than a "pure" p2p solution, which is potentially DoSable.

(BTW, I'm the Sean Lynch who posted this and this.)