Well isn't litecoin a clone of btc as well? There is mining, reward, blocksize and halving. Doesn't it look too similar? And there are other currencies which aren't clones, actually. For example, Byteball has no mining or block size and is now worth $60+. Ethereum is a platform with it's own coin and it allows to add something to the code and thus make some treaties executed automatically. I think litecoin is quite nice but new coins, solving btc code problems appear.