My opinions:
Bitcoin - Actually used as a store of value, for capital flight, as a hedge, for darknet commerce, and some other ancillary purposes. Genuinely novel, and likely not going anywhere.
Litecoin - Likely not sufficiently differentiated from Bitcoin to become major, but nevertheless compliments BTC for trading and acts as a sort of 'plan B' for some categories of Bitcoin failure.
Ethereum - Cool tech, but all the innovative parts of it are highly unproven. The most novel thing done with it (the DAO) has arguably crippled the whole scene fundamentally with the fork (Vitalik is a kingmaker, and thus could be held liable).
The "ICOs" - Pump and dump, baby! To understand this, take a look at all the ICOs (https://icotracker.net/) and look at the business plans. Basically, there's a whole ecosystem that seeks to recreate Silicon Valley, and bases their presumed success on the magic of Ethereum to give them a competitive advantage. Figure how many of those would have to be successful for the whole scene to stay afloat, and then consider whether that's even close to reasonable.
I think it's transparently obvious that 95% of the ICOs work just fine with a simple database and don't leverage Ethereum in any way whatsoever. But perhaps I'm wrong.
Some other stuff like Dash seems kinda interesting, but it's anyone's guess how the market will respond to it.
Bitcoin - Actually used as a store of value, for capital flight, as a hedge, for darknet commerce, and some other ancillary purposes. Genuinely novel, and likely not going anywhere.
Litecoin - Likely not sufficiently differentiated from Bitcoin to become major, but nevertheless compliments BTC for trading and acts as a sort of 'plan B' for some categories of Bitcoin failure.
Ethereum - Cool tech, but all the innovative parts of it are highly unproven. The most novel thing done with it (the DAO) has arguably crippled the whole scene fundamentally with the fork (Vitalik is a kingmaker, and thus could be held liable).
The "ICOs" - Pump and dump, baby! To understand this, take a look at all the ICOs (https://icotracker.net/) and look at the business plans. Basically, there's a whole ecosystem that seeks to recreate Silicon Valley, and bases their presumed success on the magic of Ethereum to give them a competitive advantage. Figure how many of those would have to be successful for the whole scene to stay afloat, and then consider whether that's even close to reasonable.
I think it's transparently obvious that 95% of the ICOs work just fine with a simple database and don't leverage Ethereum in any way whatsoever. But perhaps I'm wrong.
Some other stuff like Dash seems kinda interesting, but it's anyone's guess how the market will respond to it.