Quote:
Originally Posted by rowan
Many of them have no real value apart from making money with speculation or hype... including pre- or "almost" pre- mines by the developers and their buddies. There's even software that mines the most profitable coin at the time, then optionally auto-sells (dumps) it.
Litecoin is really the only coin that tried to do something different (using scrypt), the rest are mostly just some simple tweaks to the block target and difficulty. Any idiot who knows how to modify some values and compile from source can do it.
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Not that I entirely disagree, but Litecoin was not the first scrypt coin and also is a clone with some modified parameters.
True, a lot of those alts might die sooner or later, Weedcoin, Porncoin and a lot of others died fast, Sexcoin struggles to stay alive but Doubloons did pretty well for a pure fun coin (although Doubloons seem to be stuck in the difficulty trap at the moment).
Anyway, even those who died served a purpose. Some of them used extreme settings, for block target for instance, and I am sure a lot of the serious DEVs watched closely what worked out and what not.
Feathercoin has a hard working DEV team, a very active, growing community and survived two massive 51% attacks. Phenix Coin is developed and backed by a company and follows a biz plan instead of crypto coin fashions. Both of them are working on making their coins a functional and easy to use currency (for customers and merchants), something BTC and LTC seem to lack.