Please remove Stellite Community pool. You are degrading this crypto by suggesting them as a pool.

People on forums won't be able to tell you the future of a crypto and that includes litecoin. People thought it was dead for years and it's alive and well. People will continue to tell you its dead.

Read about its technology, watch exchange volumes over time, and take note of what countries are gaining or losing in volume and make your own determination.

My opinion is that if the developer base is stable and moving the coin around is cheap and fast, until another coin beats it at this game without top-down power struggles its not going to go anywhere.

Can anyone point me in the direction of some promising ongoing or soon-to-come ICOs that aren't ERC20? Thank you!

What ICO's in particular? There's lots of different ones.

If you mean ICOs in general, then I don't have a problem with it. ICOs are similar to US stock IPO's: when the stock hits the market, you pay an introductory price and hope it increases in value over time. In that way an ICO is not an inherently bad thing. The problem comes with people introducing ScamCoins (less common), or people buying coins during an ICO that do not gain widespread adoption or gain in value (more common). I'm a bit more hesitant about ERC20 tokens until the ETH network matures, as I would imagine many of the markets ERC20's are trying to address could be achieved by vanilla ETH as the ETH network matures. But I could be incorrect; I need to do more research into how Ethereum works.

Nothing wrong with buying ICOs! But read, read, and read some more before you do. Is the crypto going to solve problems or introduce features other coins don't? If not, I'd stay away. By definition the market hasn't had time to determine what coins offered in ICO's are worth, and therefore with no previous info, the price could skyrocket as easily as it could burn to the ground.

I do not know anything about the other coins you have mentioned. I need to do more research before I speak on them or trade them. I will research the ones you mentioned, thank you for suggestions!

The only other I have any experience with is XRP. I know XRP is advertised as a digital method for banks (and maybe eventually end users) to increase liquidity between other crypto. I recall they recently decided to lock some XRP up in escrow to try to deflate the currency a bit? This suggests that the adoption of all the initially available XRP wasn't fast enough, that they created too much XRP initiallly, or both. As an investor that makes me nervous and I have stayed away.

One more thing about IOTA: via https://www.flippening.watch/ IOTA is the 5th largest crypto by market cap. topping $2.6+bln in value. Given that it's worth so much but is not widespread and it isn't widely implemented in hardware, it could be that it's currently OVERvalued. I worry that all the money there is speculative money, just waiting on someone to pay a higher price. Not because its a useful currency. It could one day be useful! But as of right now it's not common enough in my mind to warrant being the 5th largest by market cap. I may be wrong about it being undervalued. Your guess is as good as mine  

One news site is postulating that it's about an upcoming conference in sept.

You are approaching these investment decisions correctly! Think about what problems they solve before you buy.

LTC solves BTC's network fee and leadership problems but there's no telling how long that will remain viable as a way to increase its value
ETH solves network implementation and contract fulfillment problems that it's a bit trickier for BTC to solve.
DASH solves capital liquidity problems among other things, and makes it easier for end users to use DASH as a currency.
IOTA solves internet-of-things resource exchange problems, redundancy is improved thanks to the tangle.

These are the only ones i'm familiar with enough to speak on. Good luck!

If someone tells you something is good and they can't tell you why, don't listen to them.

I move in and out of the IOTA market when the price is right. I personally think its overvalued given that its in the top 7 or so currencies by market cap but as far as I can tell, it has almost 0 active uses in the real world. US customers are having a hard time even buying and selling it at all! I try to enter under .92 and exit above if possible. Is it worth holding? Hard to say, there aren't may exchanges on which you can liquidate it and there isn't much hardware using the technology. But given the right conditions, the value could be good. Time will tell.

Hey everyone! I'm a US stocks investor that's made my way to the crypto world after a moderate interest in BTC over the years. I've moved some BTC and alts around on exchanges, proselytized to my friends and sold them a few. I'm just now joining your forums. Glad to be with the community!
I'd like to share some thoughts I have had on some alts and if you have any input or criticisms please share? Thanks.

BTC - What to say that hasn't been said? Recent BCC(h) price surge makes me wonder if there's truly room for a BTC hard fork. Aug. 1 didn't dampen the value. I worry philosophical debates about what BTC is supposed to be will damage its penetration to users and its price in the future. Years ago it was billed as a digital currency by many. I'm starting to feel it's more appropriate to call it a digital "store of value", partially due to network Tx costs.

ETH - This is the most compelling ALT to me as well as one of the more speculative ones. It appears to have a large investment base and a growing developer base and adoption rates seem to be increasing week over week by exchanges, developers, speculative traders and users. I don't see some of its features that it advertises (smart contracts namely) as having being implemented and in widespread usage yet, but perhaps these will come with time and upgraded codebases. Given the channels it has traded in within the past two months it seems like the price right now is a decent buy price for long term investing, albeit a little high. The offering of ERC20 tokens on the network could be very useful in the future as a development feature, but for the time being it's allowing the market to flood with crap. One to watch for sure, but I hope the platform matures to deal with these unforseen problems.

LTC - LTC was my first alt that I watched closely and whose market I really tried to understand. It seems like it tracks BTC's value closely and so in that way, the market expects use cases and investment revenue for each of these to be along similar paths. What makes me uncertain about LTC is that many of the problems that it solves relative to BTC are problems that exist as a function of the userbase of the currency and the price, and so as LTC grows, its differentiation from BTC wanes. Does LTC add to the overall market cap of BTC's market, or as a competitor, does it seep capital away from BTC? These are questions to which I'm still looking for answers. The developers and mining community seem to be more harmonious than BTC and I imagine that's good for the price over time.

IOTA - This one is fascinating and its use cases and technology offer solutions to problems that BTC can't solve as easily. It's not easily tradeable yet and I imagine this is keeping the price pretty low. I'm watching it closely. (EDIT) Its the 5th largest crypto by marketcap via flippening.watch, but I don't see it as having a large user base. I worry all this value is speculative value and could evaporate very easily. No idea  

DASH - Appears to be a very well structured DAO technology that attempts to solve capital liquidity problems in ways BTC and other ALTs have yet to approach. The price jump the past few days has been awesome to watch. She's on my bucket list.

ZEC - Lead Zooko Wilcox has a documented comp.sci background. The technology and hashing algorithms it uses to implement transaction obfuscation are very valuable. If it competes with anything it would be DASH, but I need to do more research to determine how similar/different they are from each other.

TLDR of my opinions: Does it have its own blockchain or blockchain-style technology? Does it solve problems others do not? Are there whitepapers available for its tech? If so, then look into it.
Thanks for reading!