The truth is most coins that have active development, unique features and are not total scams will survive. There will come a time when all altcoins will be instantly interchangeable, with bitcoin as the price conversion benchmark. Ripple demonstrated this the other day in a live demo at the Berlin Expo by sending a blockchain transaction Across 7 Ledgers. The single transaction went across public blockchains, private blockchains, a centralized ledger and a traditional payment channel. I also know this is true because I dream't it would happen last night. The good news in you can buy and hold 15 of your favourite alts with confidence instead of pumping & dumping them on Poloniex. My own portfolio consists of 4 sectors (listed in order of preference): blue chips (BTC, ETH & XRP), privacy coins like DASH, PIVX and XMR, applications (things that take the block chain to new spaces like FCT, REP, PPC, NXS and LSK (I would add REP or GNO but I hope Hivemind blows them both away) and ones I find funky that could moon: BRIT, all the crytonote coins in particular BCN, and my particular fave BURST. Even wannabes like NEM, NXT, ZEC & BTS will be just fine. So just go out and buy whatever the fuck you want, except wank coin, I'm going to grasp those bullocks by the horn.
Yeah. Altcoins that could provide solid development, innovation, and most of all, usability will most likely succeed over the long term. There are many prominent altcoins in the market, which you could buy right now with their own use cases. If you've been paying close attention to their price movements, they have been rising in value exponentially during the year, reducing Bitcoin's total market dominance.
Thus, if everything continues as is, altcoins would be widely used in the mainstream world for various applications, while Bitcoin will remain as a store of value.
The altcoins which prove to have better stability, technology, and usability, would likely remain on top and overcome other cryptocurrrencies on the markets. There is a fierce competition on which provides faster transactions, anonymity and user acceptance from around the world. Just my opinion.
