Dogecoin took off for the same reason that Litecoin and Bitcoin did:
1. Tons of faucets (forum and websites)
2. Different approach garnered media attention
3. Everyone could mine it from Day 1

Thanks.  I have a few bitcoins here and there that were invested when I bought them for like $8 per coin.

Have there been any updates on this?  I still have my account information, but haven't heard anything from the companies that accepted investments from GLBSE.  Do some of them still have contact info?

Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, etc, are brands, just like NIKE, SONY, and Apple.  When you look at Nike, they don't ever talk about the technology and features that go into each shoe.  Perhaps they have better materials and stronger springs--who knows.  In their advertising, they talk about self-improvement--ordinary people pushing themselves just like our great athletes do.

I help authors, speakers, a startups with branding.  In this cluttered, busy world, people won't remember much about us, so we have to be very clear about what we want them to remember about our coin.  Brands are communicated in images, advertisements, news stories, and even through the customer service experience.  

No doubt that Bitcoin got off on the wrong foot.

Whether the answer is ZeroCoin or something else, I think that we have seen that there are enough problems already with the Bitcoin protocol and approach to mining that something else may be necessary to protect a buy in from loss due to government efforts to seize or trace funds, scams, and volatility.  There's no question in my mind that there's a tremendous need for an anonymous digital currency.  My investment in the protocol is to push the bleeding edge.  Get more people into this to try it out, find out what works and what doesn't, then

Ethereum is, in my mind, a great evolutionary step forward in digital currency.  However, putting everything behind the Bitcoin brand name is a strategy that I don't entirely agree with.  For the time being, I think that we need a whole marketplace of altcoins that employ and different technology and different ideas.

We were just talking about this here at the New Hampshire Liberty Forum as a way to raise funds and awareness for the FSP.  However, you would think that there'd be some pre-mine given to the FSP (or at least its Board members of FSP movers) to justify doing this.  I would gladly support it if there were a viable way to help the project out.  The FSP certainly has more than enough people to create the Network Effect and get them accepted far and wide.

For extra functionality, build something in where people can send encrypted messages to other people, or that allows locked coins, colored coins, or some other functionality that is worth trying out.  Build some features in similar to Namecoin, or offer some resistance to currency volatility by reducing the block reward until demand catches up.  And use CPU mining, rather than ASIC-centric SHA256.

I'd love to work on a project like this, but I would need to see how the effort is actually going to help the FSP--rather than those ASIC mining firms that are already doing great financially.

Then you're holding on to Federal Reserve Notes, which lose value over time at unpredictable rates.

There's a market there for a less volatile altcoin.  The folks who are still here have just gotten accustomed to fluctuating prices.  There are investors who play the stock market, and then there are those who focus on other areas in the private sector.  At some point, there's a need for fixed storer of value that is, if anything, slightly deflationary.

Imagine:
1,000 buyers
1,000 sellers
5-10% of each are scammers

Some of the software, hardware, IP, services, etc, that you're trading coins for are mission critical.  The loss to you if you cannot get the product/service that you need on time is sometimes far greater than the loss of the coins themselves.

First, you never get your coins back.  Although you have locked them, they are in the hands of someone else, who simply cannot spend them.  At this point, it takes the owners of both wallets to recover part or all of their value, so both have an incentive to reach some mutual agreement.  If the other guys turns out to be a complete scammer, I'm not letting keep even 5%.  If a seller is late sending merchandise, it must contact the buyer and perform due diligence to convince the buyer to unlock some or all of the coins.

If both agree to an arbiter, then the buyer must send the transaction unlock pass phrase, while the seller (who's holding the locked coins) sends the actual locked coins to the arbiter wallet.  If the proof can be a bit of text found at some url (tracking number, shipment confirmation, blockchain.info, etc), then one could even have an automated escrow/arbiter.

In the free marketplace, there are different products that cater to different interests and different needs.  On the stock market, there are many different types of investment products, and some of those absolutely depend on being based on a stable currency.  If cryptocurrency is able to broaden its appeal, that I view that as a good thing.

Besides, who am I to say that someone else cannot invest their time and energy into any number of altcoins or other efforts.  Let each of us decide for ourselves.

There are already several cures for cancer and holistic treatments that are very effective in aiding chemo and radiation.  Still the charitable coin idea is a great one.  It would be nice there were a coin that donated money to all sorts of local charities and second hand shops.  When someone wanted to donate, they would just buy charity tokens that would be sent to their wallet, leaving behind an encrypted public ledger.  At tax time, you just go into your wallet and read the labels or encrypted subjects on all of your donations to various groups, having an easier system of receipts.  That would also make it much easier to buy the coin itself by making that donation.

If demand for the altcoin goes up, much of the value is sent out from the miners to special charity wallets.

Do you recall what mechanism Stablecoin uses to address rapid drops?  Is there a reserve built in?

As far as the price is concerned, Bitcoin's price is far from stable.  Viewed from the worst realistic case, someone who'd bought in at 1200 a few months ago has now lost almost half of their investment.  Most people have savings that cannot be exposed to this kind of risk.  In the marketplace, you offer as many alternatives as you can, and different people pursue different solutions and products.

AFTER we get scammed, we wish that we could destroy the coins that we've been swindled of.

BFL!

To stop inflation, just stop--or greatly slow--the printing presses.  When there's a price drop below the lowest 24 hour high, you reduce the block reward as long as necessary until buy orders catch up with sell orders.  In an extreme selloff, the low reward rate would continue for while.  Mining difficulty would not increase again for the time because the ASIC miners would use that downtime to mine altcoins on SHA256.

For an altcoin, you build a small reserve of bitcoins encrypted within your own blockchain.  Allow miners to accept either newly generated coins or receive 90% of that value in bitcoins. 

ScamLock, similar to multi-sig's 2-of-2 system, would allow scammed buyers to take recently spent coins out of speculation by leaving them locked (unspendable) permanently.  Scammers and disreputable companies would have less incentive to target buyers because a scorned buyer could always destroy their coins within 24 hours.

A mechanism that is designed to take coins out of circulation does not necessarily reduce its total market capitalization.  Just the opposite.  A coin that is much less likely to lose its value suddenly draws in far more investment from those who have more risk averse savings--which, in my mind, is the whole point of having a cryptocoin.

And we can have a marketplace of alternatives.  We can promote all three for different purposes.

The next altcoin to succeed will be the one that isn't a clone of everything else.  People have to get together and actually figure out the fraud problem and how to stop the printing presses when hyperinflation becomes a problem.  You cannot build a foundation for a republic on the back of a bunch of flighty get-rich-quickers.

I disagree that it would be impossible to build a new altcoin that couldn't be mined for value.  No one has yet attempted a currency that maintains price stability, or that adds enough unique value that it's worth it even for bitcoiners and litecoiners to make use of it.

Ethereum includes some interesting new techniques for building in contracts and including a Turing-complete programming language with the coin itself.

Is there anything unique or valuable about TakeiCoin?

Not the full BlockChain with all of the data that goes with it.  Each client would only cache the data that they and people in their area are using.  If it resulted in free wifi access everywhere, free Internet, phone, music, etc, that might be the killer app that brings people in.

In fact, is someone created an altcoin that did this (just transferring small amounts of encrypted data around for free or extremely cheap), that would be killer app enough for that client.

I'M ALSO SPENDING A LOT OF TIME ON MULTI-SIG AND ESCROW ISSUES.  MY CONCERN IS WHETHER OR NOT THE PROCESS IS GOING TO BE EASY, INTUITIVE, OR FREE ("as in beer").

AN ALTERNATE WWW, ORGANIZED MORE LIKE FACEBOOK, BUT WITH ALL OF THE PAGES, PM's, GROUPS, POSTS, FILES, EBAY/CRAIGSLIST POSTS, ENCRYPTED USING SHA256.

THE BLOCKCHAIN WOULD BE HUNDREDS OF GIGS OF ENCRYPTED, CONTINUOUSLY UPDATED NEWS, INFO, FILES, ETC, AND YOUR WALLET BROWSER WOULD BE A REAL BLOCKCHAIN BROWSER.