Now days we have more than 1 000 altcoins on the market. The question is, are people really using them? Frankly speaking only bitcoin, ethereum and monero are used for
P2P payments. All others are used mainly for
speculation purposes. Is it worth buying altcoins now days? I guess no, because all of them
excluding tether are following bitcoin price chart. I mean if bitcoin is going up or down, altcoins are doing same. (Tether is connected to US dollar rate and used mainly for arbitrage trading purposes) So do we really need altcoins? Regarding platforms, only ethereum is mainly used, and mostly for creating ERC tokens. All others, like waves, neo, etc are used very rarely. Monero is used mosly for shady deals because it is untraceable. (I doubt about that, because one dude who opened a shop on a dark web for selling drugs was cached by police last week. For communication he used 3 level protected VPN and was accepting payments only in monero)
https://www.wired.com/story/monero-privacy/ You can read about dark web here.
https://www.techadvisor.co.uk/how-to/internet/dark-web-3593569/ days. The main question is: Do we really need altcoins? Or Bitcoin, Ethereum and Monero are enough for crypto comunity this days?
You're right but only partially because many of the altcoins have value as utility tokens. And some gives you profit and dividends like security tokens. Every type of these altcoins do have a value for the owner. The only question is the level of this value, in some cases it is more in others it is less. Personally I have a lot of altcoins (ERC-20) in my portfolio because I do believe that when the market growth begins in 2019-2020 these coins will give me maximum profit as they already did in 2017.