Most of the altcoins out there are actually "tokens." There are 1300+ "coins" but an unknown number of them are Smart Contracts running inside Ethereum. I launched running Ethereum Classic, because I think Ethereum is over-inflated with a bunch of impossible hype ICO. 15 months after raising $100 mil, companies still have nothing to show for it. How long until people ask, "What ARE you doing?"
So alt-coins are different from tokens, because alt-coins are mined and tokens are not. My ICO is token based *but* I am going to offer a conversion from our token to a Quantum Safe blockchain in the future, which will also burn the token from existence. At launch, it will just do easy things that haven't been done before. Encrypted music, streams and movies delivered on a "per play" basis, with decryption keys sent to browser via plugin. (In-browser wallet makes the wallet public key and signature possible, as well as secure delivery.) I consider this low hanging fruit, for a lot of people it is something they raise $20 mil+ to do. Phase 2 is peer 2 peer delivery, with payment for seeding. Phase 3 is combination of DHT+Onion routing + bandwidth aggregation + bandwidth sharing. I'd like to install that code into various routers and make it so we can simply access, share, host (cache) and deliver content wherever we go. That's a cool way to fight censorship and net neutrality and it will take a few months to build. With enough funding we can do the Android, iPhone, OpenWRT, linux and PC development simultaneously. Using the portable C language, we'll be able to get browser Javascript code for free (emscripten) and support browser access.
The problems with this whole design are:
#1 No privacy built in to transactions
#2 Transaction costs scale with base currency, repricing is unstable
#3 Most of the code is external to the blockchain
#4 The power consumption of mobile devices will be somewhat high for the cryptography
#5 It isn't quantum safe.
So we'll solve all of these problems by releasing a blockchain. I'm an Ethereum/Ethereum Classic dev who works on clientside blockchain code. I don't like the algorithms, metrics, etc. Some of the code is very good, some if it is annoying. There isn't enough test cases written, code coverage is low, etc. So I've been working on these things privately and intend to release them as a blockchain. The suite of test cases I hope to release soon, I've just become distracted by writing code for the ICO, working a blockchain explorer, and dealing with holiday travel and startup woes. I have a few private investors in my Nevada Schedule C Corp, because they wanted access to my intellectual property for their businesses. This IP is not mentioned above, I am unfortunately holding back on describing a lot of the stuff I'm building. The advantage of letting them into my IP is that I'll get more development focused on it, wider use case, and faster time to market for everyone. (Generics and abstracts separated from the implementation and configuration. Basically forced good design.)
https://mediacoin.stream/ (working on a shorter domain name, I need a few more days.) I also hired a few people, using investor funds. We're doing a very low developer reserve, most of the reserve we're keeping for liquidity. (We're giving all royalties to artists, our business model is centered on the network token liquidity.) I also decided to trade Forex instead of investing my money into Mt Gox to day trade Bitcoin. I both thank my luck and kick myself for not buy and hold. It gave me good trading experience though, I suggest people read up on the "Trending Channel Trade" to understand why we're holding crypto and token for liquidity: steady growth price stability.
