When I registered in late 2013, most of the coins being released were based on Litecoin but with a different name/logo and slightly different specifications (e.g. different coin supply, faster/slower block generation, etc.). The first altcoin I tried mining was Kittehcoin, followed by Coinye. Looking at the announcements board, it seems that there aren't quite as many altcoins based on Litecoin anymore and the popularity of the scrypt algorithm seems to have dropped for new coins. I'm guessing this is due to scrypt now being dominated by ASICs.
Is there still any interest in coins based on Litecoin? And if not, then what is the coin that most altcoins are based on these days? Peercoin? Blackcoin? Darkcoin?
Litecoin has been hopelessly out of date for a while. If the development had stayed active on it you would probably see more forks. But now there's
Pfennig which is based on Bitcoin 0.9.4 and modified to scrypt. So forking a legacy currency like Litecoin isn't really worth it these days.
Bitcoin is "hopelessly out-of-date". Paper/cloth/plastic bills like the USD are "hopelessly out-of-date".
Money has nothing to do with esoteric tech culture or hipsterism.
Money is 100% about liquidity...
That's why LTC is still a rock solid #2...
And only 2 coins matter right now (because I think XRP volume is largely fake).
http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/volume/24-hour/