Many STEEM users may notice that many Bitcoin users are not fond of Altcoins. They may have one or two Altcoins that they see as "Profitable" but overall they view Altcoins as Shit Coins, and they even use the term Shit Coins. I have been using Bitcoin since 2011, and Altcoins since 2012, so I am very familiar with these arguments.
What a Bitcoiner will say about Altcoins is that they are mostly "Pump and Dump". This means that someone creates a coin, Pumps it up to a high price, then Dumps all their coins. This leaves the coins market in shambles and everyone who bought the coins at a higher price is left unable to raise the price back up. STEEM protects against this by paying Miners in STEEM Power. So everyone who has mined from day 1, still has about a year before they can pull out all of their original mining coins, and if they have been mining sine then they have between 1 year and 2 years to get out the rest of their coins, and if they are mining right now and into the future, they have 2+ years to get the rest of their coins. So everyone is in this for the long haul. Even if a few of the original miners aren't mining anymore and cash out now and over the next year, it just means that they aren't in the Pool of STEEM users anymore, there are still plenty of people with a 2 year commitment to the coin.
What makes Altcoins so called Shit Coins is that they are all, usually, based within the Bitcoin Ecosystem. No Coin has even been created, before STEEM, that brings in new people. Before STEEM every new coin was just posted in the Bitcointalk Altcoin forum, then mined by Bitcoiners, and traded by Bitcoiners. This brings nothing new to the table. But the true potential of these "Shit Coins" is what STEEM is proving. An Altcoin that is based around its own community is not a Shit Coin, and it is a Shit Coin, it's made of Solid Golden shit.
Satoshi Nakamoto did not just create and release Bitcoin, he also released the Source Code. The Altcoins exist because he released the Source Code and made it free to copy. So Altcoins are part of Satoshi's original plan, not a divergence from it. And, for example, if a coin were made by the NFL that was called Cowboy coin, and the symbol was the Dallas Cowboys symbol, and they accepted the coin as payment for Tickets or Merchandise, that coin would automatically do better than any existing Altcoin (except maybe STEEM) because there would be a community ready to accept that coin outside of the Bitcoin community. Or if there were a coin called Research Coin, and you could use it to access paid Research Journals or a single paid Research Journal, that coin would also do better than any existing Altcoin (except maybe STEEM), beacuse there would be a reason to have it. There are any number of possibilities, everything from a coin attached to a meme generator and paid people to generate memes, that would bring some value to the coin. Or a coin attached to a Video sharing website that paid people for views, or a coin attached to an Instagram type website that paid people for likes, or a coin attached to any number of things.
Another example that is obvious now that STEEM exists is that if a known entity, such as Facebook, Google or Apple created a coin, it would absolutely to better than any Altcoin (even STEEM for now) and could probably surpass Bitcoin, because the pool of people that would use and mine a Facebook coin or a Google coin or an Apple coin is huge.
So while I have seen this argument of "Shit Coins" V Bitcoins since 2011, it is a flawed view of coins. It may be based on the reality that no coins exist like the ones I am talking about (except STEEM now), but that is a limited reality. Cryptocurrencies are so new that all of their applications have not yet been discovered or put in to action.
STEEM is changing the way people will think about Cryptocurrencies, and not just people who already use Cryptocurrencies, but people who would have never used a Cryptocurrency before.
If STEEM is a Shit Coin, then it is a Shit Coin made of Gold.
https://steemit.com/steem/@cryptogee/the-goose-and-the-golden-steem-a-tale-by-cryptogee