Even BTC lacked an infrastructure once; investor confidence is one thing that can lead to that.

I'll also point out that, as of this evening, Quark is sitting at a market cap. of around $84 million, bringing it fourth of the cryptos.

The top ten are BTC (SHA256) LTC (Scrypt) Peercoin (SHA256) Quark (6-Factor) Namecoin (SHA256) Megacoin (Scrypt) Feathercoin (Scrypt) Primecoin (SHA256) Protoshares (POW) Worldcoin (Scrypt).

I firmly believe that the most secure top-runners should have difference hashing algorithms to prevent market panic if crypto flaws are found. BTC/LTC/Quark (I know, I know, as Max Keiser says) makes sense to me. Protoshares has a very interesting ASIC resistant algorithm, but they aren't at all meant to be used in a currency context; much like namecoin, they have a specific niche that they fill.