We need exchange. Where is @Yobit
Why does everyone want an exchange IMMEDIATELY? Difficulty is low as hell right now, enjoy getting easy coins before more people have their attention drawn to it.
Sometimes it is a major investment to keep mining and people might be uncertain of the future. Once there is an exchange a value can be established too. I mined for a day, but going to wait for the plans to see if I want to mine more.
Sometimes, but thats the risk/reward you need to weigh. Once it hits an exchange, the difficulty and hashrate will tend to trend toward rewarding you the same amount of coins as if you just mined BTC and used it to purchase the alt anyway, as people will take advantage of it if they can mine and insta-dump to get more BTC than they would have normally if they were just mining BTC. I didn't word that very eloquently but I'm too tired to fix it. I think you get the drift anyway.
I miss the days where a new alt could come out, and you were at best trading through a google doc on bct for weeks, crossing your fingers hoping cryptsy adds it. Sure, you wasted your time and electricity occasionally, but at least you had the opportunity for high risk/high reward situations that savvy miners could capitalize on. Today, we have an exchange rate within hours of the coins release and if the coin is booming, the hashrate and difficulty goes sky high instantly. We also had a whole lot less scam coins in those days since devs couldn't ninja launch in the wee hours of the morning, dump the instamine by lunch time, and be working on their next shitcoin before dinner.