I haven't given up hope... but I also don't have the investment in hardware that others do. I purchased a 4.5GH/s miner (Think it was a Jalapeno, could be wrong) back in March, and it is supposed to be shipped in June... but I'm past the point of really caring, so honestly if it shows up by Christmas, I'll be happy.

My money (literally) is on Litecoin, but I think both Bitcoin and Litecoin will survive. Honestly, though, I though Namecoin was an intersting idea, though I never bought in--and then it pretty much went belly-up. Still thought it was a neat idea to base the currency on something semi-substantial, like domain-squatting.

BitcoinFunding has a few small projects listed, but apparently, none are 'popular' enough to have been listed under the 'Popular' category: https://bitcoinfunding.com/project/small_projects

I'm currently mining Litecoins with my GPUs, though I have a 4.5GH/s miner on order from BFL (ordered in March). I'm not holding my breath...

Wish I'd thought about this before... I've been browsing off and on for two months, and I've only logged about 26 minutes, lol