I've been researching bitcoin for a few months, and it seems like all the really impressive people in the cryptocurrency community are working on bitcoin or bitcoin-related businesses. The guys at Ripple seem pretty good, but they're not directly competing with bitcoin. Maybe Charles Lee (creator of litecoin) is a good engineer (Google hired him, so he can't be too bad), but litecoin itself is not innovative, and when I've heard Chris give interviews he doesn't seem to have any great ideas for why litecoin is going to be better than bitcoin.

So because it seems like all the best people are focused on bitcoin, I think the altcoins out there now are pretty hopeless. Maybe I'm missing something though. Who are the most impressive people you guys know of who are working on altcoins?