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Faster confirmations? There's no such things, 1 Bitcoin confirmation is not the same as 1 shitcoin confirmation. 1 Bitcoin confirmation is already extremely unlikely to be reversed. Meanwhile alts get successfully 51% attacked on a regular basis.
Useful PoW? If it's useful, it's centralized, and you can't have a reliable financial peer-to-peer system that has trusted third parties in its protocol.
Smart contracts - still not used in real world.
Indeed I would agree that privacy is one of the main advantages with various altcoins currently over BTC.
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An interesting perspective on confirmation times. If I'm being completely honest I would say that Bitcoins target block time of 10 mins is slightly to slow in regards to some aspects of being a modern
digital cash.
Satoshi had to play it safe in this regard and of course changing this variable is now not possible as it alters the entire distribution of coins over time, thus changing the economic model.
Arguably, it is actually the block time that leads to increased transaction backlogs and/or higher network fees.
I better block time is most certainly around the 2.5 min mark IMHO.
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In terms of Useful PoW, at least three Prime number based altcoins exist (based on bitcoins proof-of-work with some additional functions), which actually store results on chain and have broken various mathematical records. Whilst this sounds impossible, its perfectly true. See my signature.
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I have also never been a fan of Smart Contracts either (or tokenization), however, perhaps some genuine use cases are now coming to fruition !?
Still, tokens are most certainly not coins.