trading: some dudes pool together their money and redistibute it.
most coins: shortlived one or two-time pumps for the trading and mining - fun
very few coins: potentially wide adopted real money
noobs have a hard time telling which is which
That's so difficult to find out which coin is a long-term coin and which is not. At the beginning I was thinking that LTC is a long-term coin and everybody were shouting at each corner that LTC is a silver ( by analogy with Bitcoins vs Gold) but now I doubt it is true.
I was invested in some alt coins but they also don't look like a long term coins but have a good dev team because I was thinking that the clue to success is a great dev team but the time has shown that it is not always the truth