You're going to need a "rpietila alt-coin observer thread" now  

As usual, I agree with all your points.  The majority of (and possible all) alt-coins serve no useful purpose.  They are dead coins walking.  The market will select the best payment network run from the most legitimate ledger.  Right now the best payment network is the Bitcoin Network and the most legitimate ledger is the Blockchain.  If, in the distant future, a superior payment technology is identified, the Blockchain Ledger will be forked or spun-off to this new technology.  There will never be a need to "panic trade" out of the bitcoin ledger and into some foo-coin ledger.  Value is stored in the Blockchain Ledger and not in the technology.

The fact that you mentioned Monero (MRO) is interesting.  The current narrative in the alt-coin community is "privacy," which was further reinforced by Darkcoin's recent moon shot.  But Darkcoin was illegitimately pre-mined insta-mined, has closed-source binaries, is not technologically innovative, and has a volatility-enhancing block reward equation¹.  Darkcoin will likely collapse, some will call it a scam, and others will say they shouldn't have invested in something they didn't understand.

But like Satoshi said, "we are pattern-seeking story-telling animals."  The privacy narrative will remain, and in an effort to avoid the pitfalls of Darkcoin, Monero may appear as the legitimate alternative.  Monero is an open-source clone of Bytecoin so the technology has a track record.  Unlike Bytecoin (which is now 80% mined), only 930,000 of the eventual 18.4 million coins have been mined, so the distribution appears more legitimate.  Experts such as Greg Maxwell consider the ring-signature approach "top notch," and it seems that more and more people keep talking about it.  And with this post now I am one of those people lol.

However, the fact that Monero has a fairly high inflation rate (which is needed for legitimacy unless the spin-off technique is employed) may preclude it from making a Blackcoin / Darkcoin-type moon shot.  

On a final note, I think people speculating in alt-coins should look at it more like short-term human psychology analysis rather than long-term investing.  I worry that a lot of the people in the Darkcoin, Blackcoin, XRP, Nxt, etc. threads over-estimate the long-term potential.  


¹The Darkcoin block reward decreases with increasing network hashrate and increases with decreasing network hashrate.  This tends to further limit new coin supply during rallies (adding to the pump), and increase new coin supply when miners have lost interest (adding to the dump).