Thanks for advice.
I should admit that my research is not about story of crypto currencies and not about technology aspects.
It's about factors that may move alt coins from innovators and early adopters zone to early majority sector on the Tech Adoption curve and futher.
What alt currency have a chance to be accepted everywhere? When this will happen? Why do you think so?
Well in order for an alt coin to move into mainstream adoption, it needs to have an unique factor. For example, Bitcoin currently is so big because it is the first, Litecoin is doing so well because it was the first with an alternative hashing algorithm, PPCoin or Peercoin as they now prefer, is doing so well due to the Proof of Stake rather than the Proof of work that bitcoin is using.
When you understand these coins, you can start digging in a bunch of others, the one thing to always remember, is that they need a unique factor, something that makes them better/different than others. (Just shuffling block times and coin volume doesn't make a successful coin)
There are many possible factors that could make an alt coin succeed, some problems are known, if you can fix one or multiple of those it would create a strong alt coin. However some problems are not yet known, due to the fact that this technology is so new. The reference to the internet gets drawn here a lot, due to the fact that a crypto currency is a multiple of things. It's a protocol (like tcp/ip which connects everything on the internet), its a payment network (like paypal), and it is a currency (like the US dollar)
An alt coin can succeed by significantly improving one out of these three, however it has a lot more chance of success when there are significant improvements in all three.
For example, some people worry that the mining of coins, costs to much electricity. If you could solve that problem, without negating any of the positive aspects of the coin it would definitely be a reliable coin. (imo any crypto currency is way more efficient in power than any fiat, just by looking at transaction fees, but ofc that doesn't mean we could improve more)
Any coin could take off, but I haven't seen one yet that has such a major advantage over Bitcoin or Litecoin, that would allow ignoring the network effect of both of those coins. (the more pc's running, the harder the coin is to manipulate, the safer your money is.)
Okey.
So, according to
laowai80 advice I have opened
http://coinmarketcap.com/ and that's what I have seen:
Novacoin has the highest price ($21.26).
But
PPcoin is on the third place. It's market cap is rather high ($ 56,407,676).
So what is more important for market
NVC or PPC?
I like NVC more, am I right?
Personally... What I've learned here (never had to much economics at school)
Market Cap is a designator for how many people are interested. (money = interest, more money = more interest)
Coin value is market cap divided by amount of coins available minus exchange hassle to get money in and out. (we are seeing this more clearly with bitcoin than any of the alt coins, the effort of getting money in and out of an exchange, influences the price)
The next one you want to be interested in is trading volume, the more that gets traded every day, the more popular the coin is and becomes.
The only reference for studies like this I can think of, is market analysis for Visa/Mastercard/Amex/Paypal on how to grow in markets. I would assume similar rules would apply to any crypto currency in getting lift off quickly. The big difference though is, that this is an open source community, rather than a company. So you'll most likely also need to get some papers on open source community behavior.
To be honest, its a challenging study, the complexity of crypto currencies is big. I don't even pretend all things tried out with alt coins, some failed horribly others might succeed gigantically. Either way I wish you a lot of success, and am happy to hear that there are already studies being towards these new crypto currencies.
Just seeing this now, you got a colleague working on bitcoin, you wanna see in how far you can combine both studies, as they have a lot of similarities. For example without Bitcoin there were no alt coins, without alt coins, some of the features in Bitcoin today wouldn't exist.
