- What are they? Are they currencies, designed to be spent, or are they commodities/valuables, designed to increase in value?
The two contradict each other.
IMO both aspects are there, but in BTC the currency side prevails.
In contrast all the altcoins are much more commodity-like.
I think it is an important distinction, because some people object to altcoins
on the grounds that there can only be one currency, and they invoke network
effect to bolster up their argument.
And of course they are right (Sorry Hayek...), but their premise that bitcoin and
altcoins are competing for the same space is a mistake. Even when an altcoin
pretends to be the bitcoin-beater, it still functions much more like a commodity.
However there is a yet another aspect of cryptocurrency that is gradually emerging, which
has been called decentralised autonomous organization. The coins are like stocks in
publicly traded company, everybody who contributes work for the organization gets compensated.
Bitcoin has been losing the decentralisation over time, whereas the newer community-oriented
altcoins seem to me much more DAO-like in spirit.
Continuing on the DAO trajectory will hopefully move altcoins farther from the dump/pump-commodity-mentality
and obsession with technical innovation towards more refined forms of social innovativiness. When the newer
"2.0" chains (NXT, XCP, Ethereum etc) mature enough we may start perceiving around us a fertile ecosystem of DAOs
with BTC as the universal currency and lingua franca of all the coins.