What do you mean by success? The potential to make a lot of money off of it? Everyone knows about it? It makes a significant contribution to the area of cryptocurrencies? It lasts for months? Years? Any of the above? All of the above? The answer may be different depending on how you define success.
Which coins would you consider to be successes so far?
I guess mass adoption is success,
Not so much huge profits even tho at the end of the day everyone wants lots of money.
But better distribution than your few major mining outfits hoarding most of the coins, rather then a little speculation about some huge profits
Those coins almost always get dumped leaving you with huge losses.
Thoughts?
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BLOCKHUNTERI think that there are a number of things that are necessary for a coin to even have a chance at being successful. You have to have a dedicated dev/dev team and community. The coin needs to work well from a technical perspective (e.g., not forking every thousand blocks). And there has to be real demand, not just speculator trading.
The real demand part is the tough one. If you can come up with a technical innovation or a novel use, your coin will likely at least have a moment in the sun. But it's unlikely that that would be enough for mass adoption (e.g., see AuroraCoin). You need more than that. To really last, a coin needs to be useful in the real world in ways that no other coin is. Bitcoin has achieved its status by being first. LiteCoin was one of the first alt currencies and has been adopted as "the silver to bitcoin's gold." DogeCoin has been adopted as a prime choice for things like tipping. DarkCoin might have a shot at being a better LiteCoin.
So the question is, what do you want to be able to do with cryptocurrencies that can't already be done with BTC, LTC, DOGE, or DRK? If you can come up with a good answer to that question, then you have a shot at creating a truly successful coin. Otherwise, it will probably won't be around a few years from now.