how is the altcoin stuff viewed by the bitcoin community? or is it the same community?
Hi phosphor,
That's a good question. I'll give a bit of history. At first there were no alt-coins. There was only Bitcoin, and really only this forum for discussion. Soon people began introducing other coins but they were basically exact copies of Bitcoin. These users just wanted to change how many coins they held. Namecoin and Litecoin were the first alt-coins that made notable changes. Namecoin was looking to decentralize domain name registration. Litecoin wanted to emphasize better distributed mining by changing the hashing algorithm to Scrypt, which also requires RAM, and making a "lighter" faster coin by tweaking number of coins (increased by factor of 4, so they'd always be cheaper) and block time down to 2 minutes.
At first people thought all alt-coins were a joke and would eventually disappear. I didn't. People began to realize that it was good to have alt-coins to test things out and see what might be good to use for Bitcoin. A good example of this is the anonymity features coins like Monero are experimenting with. (Note Bitcoin is NOT completely anonymous; it can be used highly anonymously, but this requires good understanding of how it works)
the social stuff has been a bit hard to parse with all the greed that is flying around... ICOs, etc, really made a confusing situation more confusing.
Yes, it's really crazy now that a much larger percentage of the world is involved and interested. However, the cool thing is that as crazy as it is, it's all being done in a free market with voluntary actions. That means when things settle down we'll probably have a really, really good benefit to the world that we didn't have before.