If everyone were held to what they once said, we'd get nowhere. Litecoin has contributed a lot to Bitcoin as well, and in no small part due to the good relationships between the devs. Bitcoin may never have needed all that Lightning Network and atomic swap testing on Litecoin but I'm sure every success Litecoin's ever had was only good learning steps for Bitcoin.
Anyone can make a crypto... that's actually part of the beauty of Bitcoin. You're free to do as you wish with the code. Free to improve on it, change it, attempt to create your own value on it. Hundreds have tried, hundreds will continue to try. Whether they are successful or not doesn't matter. What matters is that they CAN try. How did something so amazing become something so negative?
Oh, I wasn't saying Litecoin is bad. I like it, actually. I was simply making fun of its redundancy, having basically the same roadmap as Bitcoin, and its meme reputation as a testnet. It's a great alternative and I would hold it before ETH or any other altcoin, but I also believe that people won't need alternatives that do pretty much the exact same things Bitcoin does at some point in the future. People are completely free to create coins, fork, and use open source code, and are likewise free to call anything they want shit. I don't think Litecoin is shit, but it very well
could be once Bitcoin matures.
Yeah, I got that... heh. I sometimes wonder if all that testnet reputation got a bit too condescending for Charlie Lee, leading him to eventually sell off all his coins.
You're definitely right though about almost all altcoins doing pretty much the same thing Bitcoin already does or will do - just dressed up in fancier sounding tech that hasn't and will never get the opportunities to withstand the tests of demand and network stress.
I'm Bitcoin first and I'm not even sure I'm anything else second, but I rather think that when Bitcoin truly matures, it can only strengthen alts by showing them the way - much like how almost any national currency is a copy of the original, but still find their own place. So maybe you're right... if today's forex world sees anything outside the USD/EUR/GBP/CHF as shit currencies... I suppose one day Bitcoiners would also see alts with the same disdain, whether or not they attain significant use.