so.. which ALT do you think will survive in 2014 and actually make it to, say, btc-e?
Litecoin is almost as well established as bitcoin itself, and is arguably even better. Aside from litecoin it is really a gamble, but I think Peercoin, Worldcoin, Namecoin, and (maybe) Primecoin all have real potential. If you to go coinmarketcap.com and sort by volume, you can get a pretty good idea of which alts are real contenders. Here are the top 9, by volume:
# Name Market Cap Price Total Supply Volume (24h) % Change (24h) Market Cap Graph (7d)
1 Bitcoin $ 10,532,413,135 $ 861.26 12,229,075 BTC $ 68,855,765 -8.78 %
3 Litecoin $ 624,905,619 $ 25.35 24,654,142 LTC $ 37,146,314 -12.79 %
6 Namecoin $ 50,581,764 $ 6.57 7,697,242 NMC $ 4,157,605 -17.53 %
4 Peercoin $ 127,657,672 $ 6.07 21,024,396 PPC $ 3,175,473 -13.37 %
12 Primecoin $ 13,989,946 $ 3.57 3,914,116 XPM $ 364,288 -15.93 %
13 Feathercoin $ 11,242,582 $ 0.39 29,008,100 FTC $ 284,929 -12.71 %
16 DogeCoin $ 5,350,561 $ 0.00023 23,009,187,692 DOGE $ 222,353 +1.20 %
11 Quark $ 15,644,532 $ 0.063 247,105,201 QRK $ 198,468 -30.62 %
10 WorldCoin $ 16,402,831 $ 0.42 39,026,159 WDC $ 141,315 -16.06 %
The default setting on coinmarketcap is to sort them by market cap (not surprising, given the name of the website), however, that can give a very distorted view, because if someone creates a currency with 1 billion units and they own 99% of them, it is fairly easy to drive up the market cap to huge levels through transactions that are only a few thousand (or even a few hundred) dollars. For instance, look at the volume of Mastercoin or Zetacoin -- it is incredibly tiny, even though their market caps are quite high.
I think Ripple could also have an outside chance of succeeding as well, although I admit that (a) I really don't know a lot about it, (b) volume is incredibly small at this point; and (c) it has some potentially serious limitations, including principally the fact that it can't be mined, and that it is incredibly confusing to get started using it at this point.
