I wonder what the future holds since there's always going to be new altcoins. Will any one coin really benefit? If one becomes too popular, then a new one is launched to try and recreate it and make some money.
The market will not take seriously copycat altcoins, because the vast amount of development resources will be in the serious coin that was first and done right.
Markets demand a winner, because otherwise there is no value and the entire crypto-currency concept dies.
Although the barrier to entry for a new
innovative altcoin is not insurmountable as
I explained, the
network efforts are such that
an exact copycat is not a replacement good.
Thus most (but
not all) of these altcoins are just pump-n-dump schemes and (possibly ephemeral) marketing manias analogous to
Beanie Babies.
There are horror stories of people having their bitcoin-to-dollar transactions held up for months by the Magic-the-Gathering-exchange or just lose by Coinbase. I dont know what fraction of the total those represent, but without decent regulation you have to prepare for the worst case.
How to do decentralized exchange.