I've checked that thread, and half of the poll are just clones of bitcoin (often of zcash and dash variety). Which is why I'd like to keep discussion in here to point out the merits of what is "real".
It seems that most of the board occupants are using different optics for that word, there seems to be strong preference for marketing rather than what is actually under the hood. This is fine thing to do for short term speculation (ie to ride pump and dump trends). The idea is that in the long term, altcoins ultimately compete both in terms of time-to-market and rigorous robustness (Bitcoin has both), and finally features (which the altcoins i've listed are offering).
Just like with anything else, marketing has little to say about fundamental qualities. If the product is significantly better than incubents, it will sell itself. I'd not consider the quality of marketing to make decisions to "HODL". Best thing you can do about marketing is write a bot to track amount of shilling for any given particular ticker to catch their pump campaigns early, but it's not really useful beyond that.
This is an interesting response and one that is well worth exploring futher.. can you tell me why you consider
bitbay and blocknet and byteball to be clones of bitcoin? do you not consider them to offer something new or are you talking about some of the others listed there. I agree pivX is really just a combination of dash/zcoin/not sure what version of pos they use but I do not think it is taken from ppc.. but it is a real project in that it meet the criteria of the thread and does have a use case of an anon crypto even if that is already filled with a few others already. Of course I expect zcoin and zcash should be there too. That thread does not really rule out clones or at least active clones that are taking things futher as being real projects.
Are you mainly trying to find NEW technology altogether that is real NEW from scratch development?
I agree this way does bring forth some real creativity ... monero was a clone of bytecoin though wasn't it?
Are you bothered by initial distribution.
Should a trustless decentralised project start in a trustless decentralised way? or primarily do you just consider the technology behind it?