Dear, Doge Fanboys and cheerleaders,
My advice to new users is do a bit of research and find one of the other alternative crypto-currencies to get involved with
that offer something unique and have a real dev team with a real road map of goals.. just look for them there are many.
Many LOLs on the cheerleaders part.
Although I know almost nothing about the technical aspects of scrypt and sha256 coins and all I know is generic stuff, I like the idea behind Doge (for when it comes to promoting a coin, it is where Doge has taught everyone a lesson and a HOWTO and so far has excelled); yet coming to the second and most important part where you suggest to
find something unique:
Which are the most unique and promising coins in the scrypt mining scene? MINTcoin, VERTcoin, something else?
This is a question directed to all the tech-savvy members of this brilliant community.
When any coin can be cloned byte for byte, uniqueness and development are perhaps less important than marketing and brand. Having said that I believe strong development and support for the micro-transaction economy is going to be one of the key battlegrounds for crypto. Dogecoin, whether through luck or judgement has realized that there is a whole world of people who want to tip the content creators on twtter, youtube, facebook and many other sites for original and interesting work. This is the Internet of money in my opinion, this is where Visa and Paypal havent a hope of competing. No other crypto apart from coinye, the other 'joke' currency is even interested in this market.