All jokes aside, LiteCoin & Dogecoin(a fork of litecoin) have usage advantage or Bitcoin because it's transaction confirmation is ~2-3 mins vs 15-20 min for Bitcoin. 2-3 min is still not ideal, but it makes it better for the retail environment. The confirmation period checks if there is any fraud in the transaction. Bitpay for example takes on the risk of Bitcoin's double spend fraud (sending the same bitcoin to two merchants simultaneously). If there are some way to reduce the transaction confirmation time to seconds, then alternative crypocurrency could be widely adopted in brick and motor retail.
But it does have technical merit.<p>To repeat what I said yesterday:<p><pre><code> 1. more coins for larger transactions instead of fractions
2. faster block rate (one a minute)
3. faster difficulty adjustment time (4 hours vs days or weeks)
4. faster reward halving time (every other month or so)
5. faster time to last block (mid 2015)
6. faster confirmations on transactions
7. random rewards
</code></pre>
So it's not just a meme-coin, it has advantages technically too.<p>Their blockchain size is going to bite them though next year if not later this year. It is going to be massive and the client needs to only download block headers for performance.
The currency's not even 2 months old and people are ascribing all sorts of importance to it. Not even in a year and it will be dead with all the other crypto-currencies.<p>People get too sentimental about some things on the Internet sometimes.
When I see a title "Why [alternative currency prefix]coin is Important", I really see: "I have a substantial amount of [alternative currency prefix]coin, and I want to exchange rate to increase so I put out positive PR for it."
If you think of each coin, as a startup with a wide distributed team:
Branding, marketing, customer service, and appealing to your customer are a lot more necessary than "developer backing" or technical features.
"Branding" or "narrative" as a differentiating factor for altcoins. Reminds me of Marscoin (similar to Litecoin) which competes on the meme of implications for the future of cryptocurrencies on a planetary scale.
Well, it's important because it reminds people that anyone can create his own cryptocurrency.<p>When shares of big companies will be exchanged with a cryptocurrency-like protocol, then we'll be in business.