Why altcoins are dying
As you can see, you do not need to be an expert programmer in order to launch your own cryptocurrency. Yes you do need some system administration skills and basic understanding of C++ but in no way do you need to write new code from scratch. The reason altcoins are dying is because more and more people are finding out how easy it is to create a new coin and try to profit from it. That results in a plethora of altcoins, there are dozens of coins coming out daily on bitcointalk.org.
Furthermore, altcoinland is dominated by get rich quick scams, pumps and dumps, lies and deception. As more people get scammed by investing in a scamcoin the liquidity of the cryptocurrency market decreases as traders are left with an empty wallet. When liquidity decreases so do the prices and marketcaps. Lets look at a comparison of altcoin marketcaps back in 2014 compared to altcoin market caps today, courtesy of coinmarketcap:
altcoincomparison
Here we can see that 2014 has been a sad year for altcoins, since all the market caps have declined a considerable amount. More importantly we can see clear evidence that altcoins live a short lifespan, out of the top 10 altcoins only 3 kept their position at the top, the rest got replaced with newly hyped coins, Peercoin being the only exception. Thus, we conclude that investments in altcoins are very high risk, with a decreasing reward. With the start of 2015 and the drama with GawMiners and Paycoin, this year does not look good for any cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin.
No altcoin can compete with Bitcoin, yet
bitcoinking
Over 70% of people still do not know what bitcoin is. While some altcoins might offer improved features, better anonymity, a cleaner code, Bitcoin’s network is so robust and is on it’s way to mass adoption. If after 5 years over 70% of people are still not familiar with Bitcoin imagine how hard it would be to persuade someone to use an altcoin and explain to him the numerous improvements it has over Bitcoin. Society is just not ready for altcoins yet. Us crypto enthusiasts might see a clear advantage of a certain coin over Bitcoin but most of the time that coin will not be used in any way other than trading. In addition, once the hype dies with a new feature, or a new coin, it is left to die in an ocean of altcoin chains.
In 2014, Bitcoin’s marketcap was at around 12 billion, right behind it stood Ripples with a 2.7 billion marketcap. That means that in 2014 Bitcoin was worth around 5 times more than Ripples. Fast forward to 2015 and we can see that now Bitcoin’s market cap has decreased to 3.9 billion and Ripples to 0.6 billion. That means that now Bitcoin is worth 6 times more than Ripple. In other words, even though the overall marketcap for bitcoin and altcoins has decreased. Meaning that relatively to altcoins, Bitcoin is still doing better in 2015 than it did in 2014.
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