My personal frustration that has seriously made me wonder if ai want to be involved in alt coins anymore is the case of Qora. A complete new code that has shown itself to be superior to NXT technically on many levels is completely overlooked because it's marketing is completely lacking.
Although the OP asked for discussion of technical innovations, as a coin dev myself, I believe as far as mainstream adoption is concerned the technical innovations are not the issue (as alluded to in the above quote), as I posted in the thread
How we crypto geeks get it wrong & the reality of alt coin success.
In that thread, I we discussed what it is like in the real world, building an altcoin user community. Just to quote a taste:
---snip---
The other day on the Poloniex Troll Box, I saw a brilliant comment that summed it all up, "What difference does a new algo make for XXX (insert name here) coin, when next week there will be a newer one?"
Every other comment on the Troll box & these forums runs along the lines of, "XXX coin is no clone, the Dev created 7 new algos, the coin will soar - to da moon!" Of course that is rebutted in days with, "Yeah but XXX2 coin flips those algos sideways & upside down - to da moon!"
Ah, we geeks just don't get it!
The user community for a coin only cares technically about two things:
- Is it easy to use
- is it secure
---snip---
But it is not just marketing, although Doge has certainly shown the power of that. Any altcoin that succeeds longterm, only needs enough technology to be easy to use & secure. Beyond that only we crypto geeks on forums like this care about which algo a coin has. And believe me, we on this forum are a very, very small percentage of the worldwide user community.
As I detailed in the thread, 80% of the people we talk to on the street say they have not even heard of bitcoin, and the vast majority of the ones that have think BTC is a scam.
So it is the right combination of technology & user community that is the real innovation of any coin that lasts longterm.