Introduction

I am newish to crypto although I have followed Bitcoin from the early days. If only I had sunk money in back then :(

Now we are awash with coins, many of them "me to" type coins hoping to make a fast buck or ride off the coat tails of the big players.

Many offer little benefits other existing offerings and so are probably doomed to fail.

The following are a list of coins I think will stay the course or are interesting with potential.

Safe Bets

• Bitcoin - Ok obvious choice but just has the momentum and name brand that bar some stupid mistake down the line will always be there. I really doubt it will be common for transactions though, more high level transfer of value for large sums. The transfer costs and throughput are too high imho.
• Ethereum - Another obvious. Currently the killer app for this is ERC20 which acts as a platform for many of the "me to" coins. After the hi profile failure of DAO I have not really seen any other large projects. The thing that really hammers Ethereum though is that Gas is linked to the main coin value. As the prices rises so does the cost of a contract, pure stupidity that I hope they resolve or it could be its downfall.
• Ripple - This is just a no brainer but I doubt people will make too much off of it. The way I see it the banks will/are using for inter bank transfers but because of their desire for stable price and the huge reserve of held back coins his will be a tightly controlled environment. I know they have said they will lock up the reserved but they gain access to them once a year so can still flood the market and dump the price.
• Tether - This is linked to USD with cash to back each coin. A great safe place to get into on market down trends but the limited supply makes that hard when the market is in crash, unless they up the reserves (if they can?)

Could be huge

• IOTA - This has yet to prove its worth and the whole wallet complexity is a nightmare, needing to create new wallets whenever you spend. If this finds traction for micro payments and smarter wallets get built this has huge potential for micro payments or even as cash.
• Basic Attention Token - The current add funded internet is a mess full of dodgy practices and invasive spying. This could be the solution but they need to start rolling it and also get into other browsers apart from Brave. Unless it works with Chrome then it will be a marginal coin. That said, I think this could go big as it is a real world use that is compelling.
• Golem - This is/will be a means to rent computing power that is sat idle. Their initial test is as a render farm but once more modules come on line this could be a very good way to rent slices of huge compute power beyond what you could normally afford on a per use basis. This has some huge potential and is unique as far as I can see.
• EOS - There are big promises on this platform, from the creator of Steem. If it lives up to what it claims then Ethereum will die and this will replace it. I am not convinced on the scalability though as the costs of running a node could grow to be insane. That said, people sink huge money into Bitcoin mining so it could take off big and become a new web like platform. A few years back nobody would believe you could run a social network on a blockchain yet we have Steem.

Not convinced but

• Steem - This will probably be a surprise in this section. There are a few reasons for this. As more users come in the payout potential drops and we are already flooded with shite meme posts etc. Steem really needs more filtering options and ways to find articles to cope with this. Quality rises so it pays to put the work in.
• Siacoin - There are a few projects like this but this for me is the most interesting. A distributed file store. I wonder how viable it is for those providing the storage at the current $2/Gb payout though. Trouble is if the costs rise it becomes less attractive.

Conclusion

There are so many other coins that do not really appear to fill any need or are just copies of others. For me even coins like Litecoin and Dash could die quick is the likes of IOTA really take off and usability is resolved for "normal" people.

So what do you think? What have I missed off and why?

Woz