The real truth of the matter is that most of these major altcoins aren't even bringing anything new to the table, they look at bitcoin and say "we can do all of that BUT BETTER" and come up with some mediocre use case (most of which don't even need blockchain or decentralization) and 200bil coins not backed by any proof model and sell them to people who think they're going to get Lamborghinis.
They think they can be Bitcoin 2.0, but in reality, bitcoin is the only one that's been in the fire long enough to have developed real resiliency, and what these crapcoins don't understand is that they will, one day, run into the same scalability issues, that bitcoin is already 2 steps ahead on and actively working to fix.
Privacy, smart contracts, viable scaling... all of these are things that bitcoin will eventually be able to do and then everyone else is left wondering what the point in using those other currencies is. Sure, right now, the fees are inconvenient and the transaction time is slow and that's frustrating and annoying, but if anything, the bottle neck drives up price volatility and makes it an even more attractive speculative asset.
Half of this speculative cash being tossed around wouldn't even exist if it weren't for bitcoins battle scars.
I agree. Also I would add that what you say is why I argue against investing in a wide range of "currency" crypto coins. We do not need 10 coins that transact value as their primary use case, let alone 500 which is closer to the mark today. Just like we dont need 300 decentralized platform coins, but we have 'em anyways.
Point being, 90-95% of all coins will disappear one day, and likely the first to go will be those that clearly offer nothing but a promise of future development.
This is why I primarily invest in crypto that has a use case today, and preferrably a revenue stream to support their growth.
Some of my favourites are TenX, because I see them as a leader in making crypto spendable, and there is a market for that. More than 100,000 users in Europe so far have signed up and are spending millions of crypto already, generating fees which the company can sustain its growth upon.
There are others, like Steem, and the value it gains by the increasing appeal of Steemit.
Or Ethereum or Neo which already have many apps coming out for their platforms.
I guess what I am saying is if they aren't already being used by a customer base, altering how a traditional business model can operate, then they haven't proven themselves as a meaningful crypto, in my opinion.
I agree with you. this important thing about bitcoin that it's paving the new grounds, is not emphasized enough. ethereum also has it's scalability issues if I understand correctly. I feel like a mature crypto community would point newcomers to appreciate the brand of bitcoin, cause it really deserves the dignity. after all, the code can continuously be improved and the network already is stronger that any other rivals. anybody who dismisses the importance of decentralization is missing the whole point and I fear this becomes the coming weakness of the network. bankers are gold investors are waging a war. there needs to be great deal of illumination in2018.