Speaking as a trader and investor, merge mined coins seem to be undervalued to me.
They generally don't have shiny brands and lots of short-term hype. And they are mostly old coins.
Most technical developements in crypto have been going nowhere and most ideas never were finished. Not so merge mining. It is working like a charm and seems to be reliable.
Why are merge mined coins of interest?
For a whole set of reasons:
1st) MM with bitcoin makes a coin very secure if/when it is adopted by enough btc-pools.
2nd) They somewhat defy logic and gravity because normally running a network costs huge bucks. These costs mostly are hidden in the inflation of the coin. This translates to: The user of a coin who is not mining the coin does pay an invisible tax to the miners (the inflation) for their work of keeping the network running. These costs can sometimes be very high. For Bitcoin currently the costs per transaction are 10$. (
https://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction)
These pretty high 10$ are calculated this way: "global earning of miners devided by number of transactions"
That being said, an altcoin network running on its own does also produce costs in relation to its marketcap. More often than not an altcoin shows an initial pump and an endless slow decline afterwards. These long slow declines you see in the charts of almost every altcoin are primarily caused by the oversupply the inflation causes constantly. So what inflation does is pushing down your price very little but all the time.
Merge mined coins now in comparison can be run much cheaper because the bitcoin miner is mining bitcoins anyways. For him a merge mined coin is a matter of setting it up once and getting a small aditional income from his btc mining activities. It's a win-win situation. The miner gets more for the same hashpower and no aditional cost while the coin gets exposure to bitcoin hashpower for only small costs. Basically merge mined coins do carry hashpower which is enormous and could never be paid for by those coin communities if it was running on its own.
I hear people often say "a coin looses its personality when merged with btc because now it's only a byproduct from btc mining" . I hear this line very often and i think it is utterly irrational. Because merge mined coins are cheaper, more secure, have less inflation and live much, much longer. MUCH longer.
Now your "feeling" towards the process of creation doesn't match with the facts. Oh, wait, people saying that are likely miners who want to mine shitcoins and dump and move on. Right, merge mined coins don't accomodate the parasitic miner that's why he doesn't like them. Most people making arguments against merged mining are of that sort. They shouldn't hold it down, though. Also their interest is opposite of investors interests. In a merged mined coin investors interests and miners interests are similar and both are happy about each other.
Basically all these alts that are mined on their own have some initial hype, people buy it, interest peaks and after that point inflation pushes the price over the next 6 to 12 months to near zero. This pattern repeats over and over in coins. Not in merge mined coins with low inflation. They can be kept afloat even with low interest.
This means MM-coins are basically a group of altcoins that aren't suffering from the very fast dying off or being completely abandoned like you see it with most of these fad-coins that pop up this week and are forgotten 2 weeks later and drop to zero
So from the standpoint of an longterm investor in altcoins merge mined coins are first choice because they normally don't depreciate to zero the way the stand-alone-coins do and they are better store of value due to very low inflation. Stand-alone-alts aren't a place to park your money longterm, merge mined coins are.
A solid merge mined coin is a
real alternative for money-storage to Bitcoin and Litecoin.
And last but not least: Bitcoin blocks are full now and fees should rise. People could look for alternative chains to make txs on. Merge mined chains are just perfect to take on parts of the bitcoin load. So with this background they could possibly even turn out real good investement in case people would wake up to them. Currently these coins seem a little bit forgotten and aren't hyped a little bit so the entry they offer isn't so bad at all.
Merge mined coins with btc on the market include:
-IXcoin (no more blockreward TX fee only)
-i0coin (no more blockreward TX fee only)
-Unobtanium (active community and good things happening here, blockrewards for 300 years planned out, micro-inflation)
-Devcoin
-Namecoin
-SyS (just forked to AuxPow 256)
-HunterCoin? (vague recollection it is MM but also heard rumor it code is faulty)
-Myraid (fairly sure it is MM on the Sha256 vein)
[also XCP and Omni platforms use the bitcoin hash, slightly different than AuxPow 256 tech]
Merged with Litecoin:
-Doge
-Via
-eCanada
-Peseta
-Umbrella
-Taco
Personally i do think every longterm crypto-portofolio should have a portion in merge mined coins. But that's just my 2 cents.
Disclaimer: the author is holding merge mined coins (of course)
