Greetings, like many others here, I have some Bitcoins but want to hedge against a potential collapse in 2014 (or beyond) by buying a few key Altcoins while they are still cheap.
Here are a couple of ideas for the most likely Altcoins to be adopted in response to various BTC collapse scenarios. Feel free to add to the list or correct or whatever.
1)
Sha 256 cracked somehow: People switch to the top Scrypt coin = Litecoin.
2)
A 51% Attack is successful on Bitcoin: People adopt the top Alt that is 51% resistant = Peercoin?
3)
Mining Begins to Consume too Much Energy: People switch to the top energy efficient Alt = Peercoin?
4)
Sha and Scrypt are both cracked: People switch to the top CPU-mined Alt = Primecoin?
5)
Governments/Central Banks aggressively ban all aspects of Bitcoin in most countries: People switch to the best Anonymous Alt = Anonymous Coin or Zerocoin for Bitcoin?
6)
Governments/Central Banks crack down on exchanges: People stay with Bitcoin but trade through local exchanges or emerging distributed exchanges (emunie?).
7)
Governments/Central Banks crack down on Bitcoin as currency but not as store of value: People stay with Bitcoin and possibly adopt coins designed to be scarce, such as Cryptogenic Bullion (limit of 1,000,000 coins).
Transaction confirmations begin to take too long: People adopt the next fastest coin: Litecoin is next in line?
9)
Scrypt is cracked: People stay with Bitcoins
10)
Regional Alts begin to emerge for economic powerhouses: People switch to Alts like: Deutshe EMark for Germany, Chinacoin for China...etc?
11)
Extreme fluctuations (for whatever reason) cause demand for a coin with stable prices: People switch to top non-fluctuating coin = Stablecoin??? or is there even an Alt that is designed to be stable?
etc...