Why are there so many altcoins?

[pilscoop]

What's the deal?
Do people really use them? Or is it just for speculation and trading?

[3x2]

99% are just for speculation. no actual use.

[tiggytomb]

I agree, there are hundreds with most of them being dead coins right now.  Only a hand full have stuck around for a year or two, I think as they are getting easier to create people pump and dump and then move on.

[seedtrue]

Because of coin creation services, and a few select people releasing multiple ones each week. They make a few dollars more than it cost them to buy the creation and that is a lot of money in whatever ass backwards country they come from. No offense intended to ass backwards countries.

[Zawamiya]

What's the deal?
Do people really use them? Or is it just for speculation and trading?

because everyone makes a new coin with hope that their coin will rock the market and they will make big money so they launch another crap coin, more then 98% of them are dead, no one uses them

[miragecash]

For the same reason that there's a similar number of Linux distros, it's open source, so it is easy to implement a small improvement over the previous version and call it your own distro. You don't have to waste time reinventing the wheel.

There are 275 Linux distros according to Distrowatch.com . According to coinmarketcap.com , there are 688 cryptocurrencies out there.

[50cent_rapper]

Well, Satoshi made a "ninja" launch and hase been mining alone almost a year, so he has a premine of 1 000 000 BTC.

In DOGE, for example, community tryed to make a fair launch without premine.

[maokoto]

they are mostly for speculation or "investing" if they are POS (which is another form of speculation). It might be that some of them get to actual use, but is highly improbable.

[tokeweed]

Why are there so many altcoins?

The more ways to fleece you with.  And it worked!

[HCLivess]

Why are there more than one servers in the internet? 

[Spoetnik]

They are ALL digital ponzi scheme tokens.
Made to take your fiat / money.
In order for them to keep taking more money they have to keep making more "coins"

[Spoetnik]

Why are there more than one servers in the internet? 

Because they are needed unlike 8,000+ "coins"

[rnicoll]

What's the deal?
Do people really use them? Or is it just for speculation and trading?

As many posters have said, the majority are a small set of groups just churning out new coins on a production line, persuading new people to mine them until they're listed on an exchange, then dumping and disappearing.

The next biggest group are people who go "You're clearly doing it wrong, get out of the way" and launch a coin, often therein discovering why something was done one way or another.

Another big group is those who launch coins to see how they work (this sounds like a good idea, but isn't, it's a huge amount of work and it's a lot easier to try working with an existing coin).

[Snail2]

What's the deal?
Do people really use them? Or is it just for speculation and trading?

Because of lot's of people want to get your money. As there are no point (and even less profit) in pointing you to coins made, controlled and manipulated by someone else, these guys all made their own stuff for every possible market segments what they could imagine. Actually there were/are a few guys around with honest intentions and good ideas but they are a very small minority. So the deal is luring you into a good looking but in reality worthless "investment" and then run away with your money, then rinse and repeat with a different name and coin.

[shanem]

Many of the devs created altcoins to suck bitcoin out of the market. This is one of the reason why none of the altcoins fail to overtake bitcoin when these altcoins are used to pump and dump.

[MisO69]

You think this is alot? This is nothing, peanuts, compared to what is coming. If BTC takes off like some people think, alts will as well. This will attract many new users, devs, scammers etc. With the Gemini exchange and COIN ETF around the corner this could happen in 2016. I predict we'll see 10 altcoin launches a day, on a slow day. With all the fancy graphics and promises we have been seeing for the past couple of years. Noobs will be baited and continue to loose money.. nothing wil change it will only get worse.

[Shinpako09]

I think their goal is to pass the bitcoin or even come close for them to earn money by way of selling huge amount of alt in a small price.

[stellargratis]

What's the deal?
Do people really use them? Or is it just for speculation and trading?

trading speculation not use

[benthach]

What's the deal?
Do people really use them? Or is it just for speculation and trading?

altcoin = get rich quick scam world
people making coin in hope of striking rich without working hard, example of striking rich are ethereum, darkcoin, nxt, dogegcoin and ton others.

seen altcoin scene is dying down we have people like bobsurplus and his team who creating hundred and hudred of shitcoins and collecting little by little btc from the dumb morons who would fall for a dog dried poop pack in a plastic bag with label,"this dried poop will take over the world in 1 week". in the next day these dishonest morons team would go find dried raccoon poops and the next day they would go find duck poops etc.. etc... making easy money from dumb morons selling poops. the dumb morons think they got a pretty good deal for the poop which can take over the world by buying some of them in hope of resell to another dumb morons. all these dumb morons not realize these free poops is useless. most would end up holding priceless poops. the poops would dissolved to nothing and disappeared eventually. you get the point.

[HeroCat]

It is just popular nowadays make your own altcoin. There are even companies, who can help you to do this. You just pay - and have your own crypto coin.