more promising pastures (which also provided counter-party risk protection as a minimum.)
Which ones are those?
I don't know of any.
I don't either. I've been remiss in studying alts because there are just so fucking many of them.
There are certainly alts, but they are pretty much the same as bitcoin unless you are getting down in the weeds of various implementation details (but given your reply, perhaps I misunderstood what you meant and you are indeed interested in those technical differences).
That's what I meant by not knowing about more "promising pastures" that lack counterparty risk (other than cryptocurrencies).