Thinking about it, why would someone buy an altcoin as there is not much that can be done with it. Everyone just converts back to BTC. There is no future earnings potential and you cannot buy something with it. The problem is that there are too many coins out there, with each one following the same pattern from rise to demise. What is needed is a market with only a few coins that are actually accepted as payment. Asics sold out on the basic principle of distributed processing by ruining both Bitcoin and soon Litecoin for the man on the street. Any Scrypt coin is doomed imo. The future for the man on the street is Asic resistant algos like scrypt-n, but then there must be some kind of motivator for people to buy it. It seems like the markets are just full of bag holding miners that want to sell. We need buyers for the coins and who will buy coins if they cannot do anything with them? The buyers out there I think is getting tired of ending up with bags of worthless coins. A lot of the new coins have weak markets because buyers dont want to burn their fingers over and over. The GPUcoin that has just launched is a atep in the right direction by providing some kind of value if it does end up being accepted for GPU purchases, but that is not enough as we need something more than that that is accepted as payment for stuff, not just being traded for other coins. If BTC can be an indicator, perhaps we should learn from it and replace Litecoin with an Asic resistant coin as the BTC alternative produced by the man on the street, not by a few powerful companies. That is of course if we want to keep processing distributed and in the hands of the man on the street.

If we dont keep processing decentralised, we can just as well usea central model where digital money is produced centrally.