Maybe you have the wrong alts...
There are no "right" alts. They are all failures at creating a decentralized digital currency, just like BTC failed. The closest to do so would maybe be IOTA, but it doesn't work because it's not possible to form consensus in a DAG without artificial convergence. Don't get me wrong, this is not an endorsement of IOTA, just the best try that still failed. Why I say they came closest below (and no, there will be no random new coin that solves this problem because it's not solvable):
Bitcoin will ALWAYS be a higher risk asset than metals due to having built-in middle men and not removing counter party risk. It's semantics to even claim bitcoin currently isn't a federated chain already. It's the equivalent of something like a 2/3, 3/5, or 4/7 multisig for years. A permissioned ledger doesn't require a 1/1 sig requirement; it's a permissioned ledger already.
If you really want to get technical, everyone would likely have to process their own transactions for it not to be a permissioned ledger like in IOTA, but DAGs and IOTA don't actually work for convergence, so we won't go there. But until you can create a functional version of that model where everyone processes their own transactions (not possible), you have failed and it's a permissioned ledger. Everything in this sector is nothing more than jacking off while creating centralized Rube Goldberg machines, federated chains, and permissioned ledgers.
IOTA was actually on the right track probably more than any of them so far just because it actually does seem to remove the usurious middlemen factor, but DAGs don't work. And the second you incentivize any type of economy of scale in transaction validators, you've just created a usury system that mirrors the ones that already existed in the real world before bitcoin. Physical commodity money like silver and gold removes the middlemen parasites. Cryptocurrency doesn't - they're BUILT IN.