Will 2G and 2.5G coins just be replaced by 3G coins, etc??

[Primitive]

there's an explosion of new coins with new "features"

but what happens when the steady flow of coins with more and more features continues?

i understand how BTC will survive (first mover, largest by far) but I wonder what the current crop of coins must do in order to be around in a few years?

[boxuser]

who knows, might be possible, or the developers/community might take over and update the coins

[kbm]

I believe the question is whether or not your 2G buzzwords will ever replace your 1G buzzwords. Stop stealing cell phone marketing ideas.

[Kiloday]

It would not be a good thing for newer innovative coins to continuously replace older coins that were innovative when they were first launched, and then for each new generation to die like the way older computer or mobile phone models do today. The blockchain represents the investments of countless people who believed in the coin's success. Who would invest in a coin with an expected lifetime of a couple of months to a year or two? Unless you plan to transfer all of your assets out of the old gen and into the new gen every time a next gen coin is released. Hence I would think that only coins with a healthy community and a committed dev team (or even multiple dev teams such as in the case with Bitcoin) that implements new features as the market demands them will survive. Such coins will gradually evolve through the generations, from 1st gen to 2nd gen to 3rd gen, and so on.

[Willisius]

Coins are always going to be in active development. The whole thing is an experiment. We may see features we don't think are possible now in the near future. Those generation labels are invalid though. "Second generation cryptocurrency" means nothing.

[henryjames1003]

there's an explosion of new coins with new "features"

but what happens when the steady flow of coins with more and more features continues?

i understand how BTC will survive (first mover, largest by far) but I wonder what the current crop of coins must do in order to be around in a few years?

Now is not the time for new altcoins, there are white noise of bad-quality forks. may be few years later when making poor quality coins comes really unprofitable (in community not-investing in scamcoin i'm trust)

[phzi]

New "features" will either be rolled into the main secure blockchains (bitcoin and litecoin so far) that have enough consistent and growing hashing power to sustain orphan resistance.

Coin features are just gimmicks.

[MicroGuy]

there's an explosion of new coins with new "features"

Features don't make coins valuable.

The value of a currency is mostly dependent on the energetic output of the community. Look at Bitcoin for a prime example.

[phzi]

there's an explosion of new coins with new "features"

Features don't make coins valuable.

The value of a currency is mostly dependent on the energetic output of the community. Look at Bitcoin for a prime example.

I'd counter that the value in a crypto network is it's blockchain security and orphan resistance.  For proof of work, this equates to a high and consistent network hashrate that MUST be the top hashrate coin for that PoW algo.  Aka: BTC, LTC are the real blockchains of value.  Everything else is just an experiment that may or may not be rolled back into these real blockchains.