Ok, lets give a run down of what we have going on:
Bitcoin - the oldtimer that has all of the hype. It is first to market, and is unlikely to disappear for decades (centuries) to come even if something else replaces it. It is the original, and people like originals, and that is the only reason it has value over the other coins. You could argue mining power, but that is because of value, and thus is derived from hype.
Litecoin - AKA, darn, I wish I could have mined bitcoin, and F that, I am not buying fancy hardware. Besides, all that fancy hardware just makes for less democratic mining, and wasn't that what satoshi really wanted.
Namecoin - Bitcoin is pretty neat, lets make it do something useful besides a system of accounting. This would continue to be awesome, but they did merge mining with bitcoin and rely on ASICs and whatever, who wants to f with that.
One million litecoin and bitcoin clones. Each thinking they are special because they use a cuddly panda bear as a logo and have a different mining rate, hashing system, etc. Some try to justify mining better with the fact they are solving primes or whatever, but really, mining is never the point. Mining is the hack that makes a distributed accounting system work.
My crystal ball says the true winner, maybe even to be a tough contender for bitcoin, doesn't exist yet, but I will describe it here for those who want to keep an eye out for it.
* It would use scrypt or some other hashing that is cpu bound and would have 1 minute blocks because really, that is ideal.
* Mining would start by default, and it would be super easy to add a pool in the client. The client would also have the best mining tool built in and just be a button press to start stop. Ideally pooled mining would be decentralized.
* It would not have some crazy deflationary thing built in, but provide a steady stream of currency forever. Yeah, it is boring, but we aren't trying to replace gold here, we are trying to replace dollars, and other fiats. They aren't get rich quick things, but things to build an economy of transactions on.
* It will allow you to do a lot more than just transfer money between addresses:
** You will be able to create a new colored coin at a 1-1 ratio for a small fee
** You will be able to set a key=>value store just like in namecoin
** Escrow (but most coins have that)
** Put colored coins up for sale at a certain price point for a certain number of blocks
** Put up actual ecommerce style listings and include a checkout and rating system
** Put up news / messages
** Send private messages
This is all the stuff I could think of at the moment. But bitcoin is a distributed account ledger and data store, and basic transactions are only the beginning.
Other tidbits: I feel that it should not use bitcoin-qt as the base environment. Python, or a web server running on a desktop with a html/css/js frontend would be superior so that front end development would grow rapidly.
Oh and yes, I could see another altcoin succeeding without any new features. It would be one created and backed by a government, and I see that happening someday soon. Perhaps part of it's transaction fees would be collected automatically as taxes. It would have the backing of men with guns and probably some old ideas attached to it, and thus its appeal.
The value of any altcoin is just what makes it different, and just changing some basic parameter in mining and generation isn't going to do it.
That is insightful. Thanks for chiming in on the newbie board to give us something to chew on. You are correct...if a government puts out a coin, it will be used. I don't think it would rise in vaule though because they don't like major flucuations. They would pre-mine it all and just use it for transactions of large amounts. I am not sure we would even know about it...in fact, maybe it's already out there.
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