I have done a long, deep and intensive research over days and weeks just in case to diversify a small part of my investments into potential interesting projects/coins. Beside ETH (which wont make any really big gains any more) and XMR I only could find IOTA interesting, while still very experimental. Everything else is damn useless bullshit I would never put a cent in. Even BTC is a bad joke from fork to fork it is becoming just an expensive, overvalued and slow altcoin with no special features.
Simply happy to be invested in XMR.
I did the same research and came to exactly the same conclusion. BTC, XMR, ETH and IOTA are the only ones that are interesting and XMR and IOTA are the only two that I currently have skin in.
Although I do have my eye on a future project as well
https://www.metronome.io/ Blockchain agnostic, worlds first 1000 year crypto currency. It's got a good "story". It's a catchy pitch.
Brief look at MTN and looks like a bad joke to me. From the "owner's manual":
Some cryptocurrencies' mintage is either static or goes to zero over time like Bitcoin1 and Litecoin2 raising questions with economists about their long term viability. Other cryptocurrencies token supply is hand-stitched together in pre-ICO deals that award certain parties a vast amount of supply, resulting in those parties controlling the majority of tokens.3 Some cryptocurrencies sell out to certain parties in a pre-sale, leaving very little to the general public. Metronome attempts to fix those problems with daily auctions that provide an on-going token supply mintage, ad infinitum. An ongoing token supply mintage is theorized to provide sustainability versus other cryptocurrencies whose mintage either is or goes to zero.
They're taking a 20% premine and lord knows how many of their own ICO tokens their going to "buy" up in the presale.
From the table at the end:
BTC is famous for its contentious forks and deflationary nature. Token supply and issuance is stable, but infinite.
Garzik is a key character pushing the latest and most contentious fork. And how the fuck is MTN supposed to magically be above contentious changes to the code? Code is law? How did that work out for Ethereum.
Sorry, but I just don't see it. Looks like shit token that Garzik is trying to hype by leveraging the chaos that he has a hand elbow-deep in wrt Bitcoin.
Thanks for the perspective. I can't say that I disagree with any of it. In addition to the problems you mentioned the 2% annual inflation rate makes me throw up in my mouth a little. But it's still an interesting idea and an idea that, now that its out there in the memespace, is probably going to end up attracting a lot of capital in one form or another by the time its all said and done. My thinking is that maybe MTN will end up being the Bytecoin to cryptonotes Monero but first mover advantage is a powerful thing and probably shouldn't be dismissed lightly. Much thinking yet to be done. In the end its not really about principles. It's about making money and the flaws that you mentioned dont make it obvious that there wont be significant opportunity to do so.