Altcoins as a commodity may not be a very good idea. Like the Gold Standards of yore, the more valuable an item becomes, the more likely people will desire to hoard the item rather than spend it.
This is essentially why governments went off the precious metal standards. What costs 2 BTC now will cost 1 BTC tomorrow and so on because no one will be willing to spend such a valuable item.

Altcoins as a currency, on the other hand, are a wonderfully innovative idea! However, to be a currency, a unit of exchange needs to be exchanged.
Thus my question: What characteristics would the "Perfect" Altcoin have?

In my humble opinion, the Perfect Altcoin would.....
   1. Have a reasonable minting/mining timeframe, say, between 5 to 15 minutes per block,
   2. Adjust Difficulty every block,
   3. Have Transaction Confirmations around 30 to 150 blocks,
   4. Have Proof-of-Work, Proof-of-Stake, and maybe something we could call Proof-of-Use (no idea how this would work, but maybe something like a % cash back type thingy),
   5. Built-in Deflationary measures, like Proof-of-Stake would be of limited duration before Demurrage set in (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_(currency)), somewhere around 30 to 90 days,
   6. Be Sha256 based (although when Scrypt ASICs reach the open market (http://alpha-t.net/blogs/news/8982747-development-update-13-10-2013), this will be moot),
   7. Have a way to force a refund from Businesses via a regulated, disinterested third-party,
   8. Have perhaps a way to earn interest by loaning the altcoin to others,
   9. Be so easy to use in day-to-day transactions that little, old, technophobic grandmothers never have to ask twice about it.

These are just a few ideas and, of course, are in no way to be considered an exhaustive list of ideas, which is why I posit the Question.

Also, I posted this question in the Economics section because the Question is more about how to create a cryptocoin that encourages economic stimulation rather than commodity holding.

What are your ideas?

I do so love the Escrow answer.... another BUSINESS that answers to no one when it comes to Altcoins...

Escrow: Money held by a "Trusted" Third Party.... Like a BANK... Hmmm... Yup, that's not centralized or anonymous in anyway at all, right? And what if this "Trusted Third Party" decides to KEEP your Altcoin? How would you get it back? I mean, as it stands, no court or agency could force them to do so without the Personal Wallet's Passphrase (One good thing DPR did for the Altcoin community was prove this to be true). And there are no laws actually regulating BUSINESSES that have either chosen to accept these "novelty" digital fake coins as payment OR hold them in Escrow.

So, let me get this right..... The grand Idea is to have a decentralized, anonymous currency that you either want to non-anonymously hand over to an unregulated Third Party and simply "Trust" that any and all businesses (including the Escrow Company) will simply return your coins to you if a contract goes awry because you stomped your feet, held your breath, and wrote angry emails saying, "Give it back?" How's that working for you? In that case, I'll be your Escrow ;-D
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As for contracts that are payment upon delivery, I can see that working for some things, but not most things, day-to-day kind of things. However, suppose the contract is fulfilled and upon receipt of the purchased item for which POD was agreed upon that it's broken or not what you ordered? After several lengthy phone calls and days of emails where they either insist that the right product got shipped or some other absurdly disturbing sequence of interactions, you decide that you want your money back.... given that businesses are using the exact same altcoin wallet/bank that private, real live people are using (the same wallet that DPR has that the FBI can't get into without his PW).... how would you go about getting your money back let alone having the issue enforced?
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Oh, and I just thought of something else: How could recurring automated payments be set up with Altcoins, or will every and all transactions have to be manually sent like in the good old days before computers and internet? (Something I can see as being a good thing maybe, in that is would slow the World down in some respects ) Say someone figures out how to set this up via automated api call/sends and ssh tunneling and somehow there's a an over charge/spend on someones part? Just floating ides.

Contracts? Please expand on the concept?

I'm vaguely aware that there are many features of BTC that are currently locked to the live blockchain and only available on the testnet.... I think I heard mention of "contracts" once, but it was never really explained.

Just floating an Idea.

One of the main concerns put forth from the mainstream economists concerning the viability of any altcoin becoming a full fledged, "legitimate" currency is the inability to cause  chargebacks, debit reversals, or refunds. Let's say that you buy something online and pay with an Altcoin but fail to receive what you payed for (ex: pre-ordered BFL ASIC Miners). Well, you want your product/service or your money back. As it stands now, unless the "legitimate business" voluntarily returns your altcoin to you, you're basically screwed.

(and how can you prove you were the one who sent the altcoin to them in the first place seeing as how all transactions are "anonymous," but that's another topic for a different thread, me thinks)

In learning how to set up miners via config for both pooled mining and solo mining, I noticed something interesting: anyone can remotely connect to their wallet on their home computer via the rpcallow port from anywhere in the world. There's a bit of technical stuff concerning just exactly how anyone can do this having to do with how to write the config and accessing it via json-RPC (http://www.autoitscript.com/forum/topic/152472-bitcoin-json-rpc-example/). And most Wallets have a Debug Console that will list all the commands it will recognize, including the ones I found particularly interesting:
   sendfrom <fromaccount> <tobitcoinaddress> <amount> [minconf=1] [comment] [comment-to]
   sendmany <fromaccount> {address:amount,...} [minconf=1] [comment]
   sendrawtransaction <hex string>
   sendtoaddress <bitcoinaddress> <amount> [comment] [comment-to]
   walletlock
   walletpassphrase <passphrase> <timeout>
   walletpassphrasechange <oldpassphrase> <newpassphrase>
   

Here's a Chart I made that explains how it could possibly maybe work. Again, I'm no expert programmer, but I do understand the concept of Open Source.
And here's the text from the diagram, incase it's not easily readable:

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Private Wallet
How it Works:
     Exactly as it does now.

Business Wallet
    How it Works:

• 1) Certain parts of the wallet.conf are compiled into the wallet-qt.exe and walletd.exe, specifically the parts that allow for Remote Access/Authorization.
• 2) Addresses can be created but not deleted.
  
• 3) Whenever the wallet.dat file comes online, it automatically announces it’s presence to the Authorized Chargeback Agency (ACA) and all Public Keys, Private Keys, Addresses, and Pass Phrases are forwarded to the ACA.
• 4) A % of all Incoming Transactions are placed in ReserveBalance for a certain period of time, after which they “mature” into accessable funds.
• 5) BUSINESSES that want to legitimately/lawfully accept Altcoins as payment are REQUIRED to obtain an “Altcoin Acceptance” License AND use a Business Wallet issued by the ACA.

(Don't know how to actually upload/embed an image, so I just did what I could. Right click on image icon and open in a new tab to see it, apparently)

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Much appreciated and thnx.

As for my initial Question, I've been searching the interwebs for about a week for an answer but to no avail. Thus my motivation for proceeding with completing this registration after having signed up several days ago... I need to be able to posit questions to the Community-at-large. In this case in the Alt Currency section. Thanks for the advice.

New to this Forum.... so... um..... Hello.

Also, seems that I had 250 StableCoin in my wallet from mining (17 found, 7 orphaned), , got the required confirmations (6/block), waited for them to mature (32 blocks), then had them available. Good news, right?
Well, about 15 minutes after I stopped mining, all 250 of them were gone. I checked the Debug window only to discover that all 10 had suddenly been reclassified as Orphaned. How can that happen?

Why was I mining these falsely-so-called StableCoins? Yup, you guessed it... am a Noob to this mining stuff. Using the low difficulty rate coins to learn how all of this works. Now I just need to get a few gazillion block erupters and I'll be good to go.... maybe.....