It is alleged that many (if not most) altcoins are P&D schemes where the float is significantly controlled by a small group of insiders and vested interests, who can buy from themselves to pump up the volume, price, and market cap.

Ranking altcoins by market caps seems to influence newbies to make irrational investments. "Hey ShitCoin#5 is worth $billion, thus I could be worth $million is I own 1/1000th of it!" But failing to account for the fact that the liquidity is fake and thus attempting to sell for $million would collapse the price.

I thus suggest an idea for a new metric for ranking altcoins.

Sqrt(M x H)

M = Mean transactions fees paid per unit time to decentralized proof-of-work miners
H = hash rate (normalized in electricity cost per hash to SHA256).

Note transaction fees paid to staked miners (e.g. proof-of-stake or Dash's masternodes) can't qualify as transaction fees, because the miner is certain to win a block and can pay himself as much transaction fees as he wants to without any true cost. While this is also true of proof-of-work, this is offset by multiplying by the hashrate, because as the hashrate increases, then the likelihood any particular miner can win a block decreases over any chosen period of time and the overall costs of controlling the mining increases (which is not true for staked miners).

Also increased hashrate implies increased security against a 50% attack, assuming the hashrate is well distributed.

The metric doesn't capture the advantage of having a very high transaction load relative to the hashrate, which is an advantageous electrical efficiency. If anyone can think of how to incorporate this into a metric, please share.