What's the next big thing?

[RealBitcoin]

i am 100% sure that if someday bitcoin dies at least litecoin would not take its place, as you yourself said litecoin is just a copy with no useful feature. so i don't see any chance for it.

but other coins might have a better chance BUT i personally would not consider any substitute for crypto since if something huge like bitcoin dies other altcoins which are just small projects in comparison with bitcoin, would die too.

No because BTC and LTC given their identical nature, they can substiture eachother.

And so far I dont see any coin that come nearly close to their security. Maybe BYTECOIN can replace it.

Or if a more decentralized/anonymous approach is needed then Monero.

Other than that, these coins dont have as many devs, but who knows what the future holds right?

[mallard]

The problem I see with Ethereum is its lacking of incentive. There are so many interesting technologies that no one cares about because of no incentive, such kind of technology would not direct benefit the participants, it must be driven by a centralized organization who have lots of resources to invest and make some products that can be accepted by market

For bitcoin the incentive for participants are very intuitive: You mine the coins and sell it for profit, you accept bitcoin payment thus make bitcoin more valuable

How could an average Joe to benefit from Ethereum? I think the Ethereum from its very establishing is just to prevent normal people from participating:

"What Ethereum intends to provide is a blockchain with a built-in fully fledged Turing-complete programming language that can be used to create "contracts" that can be used to encode arbitrary state transition functions, allowing users to create any of the systems described above, as well as many others that we have not yet imagined, simply by writing up the logic in a few lines of code."

You need a doctor degree in computer science to understand what is the meaning of all these buzz. And still, the concept of "contracts" are not solid due to the fact that it need centralized authorities to enforce

That's a very valid point. Ethereum needs more PR. We need all those crazy altcoins users to start to hoard some eths an increase the value.
We need a solid user-base, and focus on the monetary aspect of Ethereum too. The Solidity and Smart-contracts are the main point s of ethereum, but right now, they aren't the ones bringing the money to the platform.

Ethereum hasn't properly started yet. They're still in the frontier phase.

[Agaguk24]

Eth, Bitshares, Banx, upcoming Neu, STR, Ripple, NXT are all big coins that jumped straight to the top of coin marketcap list because they had tons of funding to back them up with some marketing and an echosystem to get them started.

None of them however is seeing this artificial and initial echosystem snowball and develop to a whole environment; and it looks like the Devs of these big coins got what they wanted already - so don't expect anything from them anytime soon. Don't buy these coins.

[Amanda2015]

The service of Bitcoin can meet the requirements of big trade and become a safe tool for storage of assets.

[spassbold]

Gridcoin (GRC) is in my opintion the best coin to support as supporting it involves supporting sciene and advancing humanity. The best thing about it is that even total crypto-newcomers understand the idea behind it and want to contribute their computing power, see for example https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/3k059i/run_boinc_on_your_home_lab_offset_electricity/

The mining process consits of running BOINC (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Open_Infrastructure_for_Network_Computing) research simulations on your computer, for example folding proteins, simulating a brain or searching for aliens.

You get rewarded for this research in a completely decentralized way. If you are interested go to gridcoin.us or visit our IRC: https://kiwiirc.com/client/irc.freenode.net:6667/#gridcoin

[BurstIncomeAsset]

I think BURST is the next big cryptocurrency:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=731923.0

We are in the process of reorganization, and improved mining network with big community support coming from veteran members of it.

Yet the price is realy low, and inflation is decreasing, so it can be a potential big thing. Also it can be a potential angel investment with high rewards coming soon, if the price will start to go up.

1 BURST = 28 satoshi, so it very cheap at the moment.

[LiQio]

Eth, Bitshares, Banx, upcoming Neu, STR, Ripple, NXT are all big coins that jumped straight to the top of coin marketcap list because they had tons of funding to back them up [...]

Concerning initial funding: care to share some numbers?