The new kid on the block is Cardano. It is called the Etherum killer, if so it is sad, because ETH was very innovative. They are both smart contracts, but with Cardano there is no mining, but "slot leading". Mining might be a thing of the past in crypto currency.
Since Bitcoin Core holders didn't dare to debate the technical inferiority of their coin, I will take they accepted defeat. Case in point: See? No technical discussion, their only argument is price (which by the way just dropped 40%), what is NOT the topic of this thread. Anyway, another interesting newcomer is ZCash, a privacy advocate coin, where sender,receiver and amount are all secret. Also fungible so you can't follow a coin's history. https://z.cash Honestly, if these coins will actually work, (Monero, Zcash) than even LTC is obsolete. Privacy is a minimum requirement I think for future money transactions. BTC and its "anonymity" my ass... Now there could be cases when the sender wants to "announce" the transfer like in a case of a donation (or voting) or big item purchase, but generally most people would prefer fungibility.
Actually BitCoin has won the race, it had a child called futures. With the ability to get in and out both long and short, all that's needed for it to profit is movement. Which it has enormous amounts of thankfully. Now ask yourself are you an investor or you a trader.
I'm only beginning to read about it, but there are some interesting technical worries about Zcash: The CEO doesn't understand his own tech (said so directly, and made contradictory tweets) 10% of all total coins go to the founders as reward, and the "trusted setup" means that they could technically have lied about the number of coins available to mine. Only 23% of transactions opt to use anonymity so far (it's not mandatory) so these are like Tor traffic: they stand out and ideally it should just be the norm to be effective. Processing transactions is as resource-hungry as Bitcoin, around 7-27tx/sec on the current network (though they are working on "low memory proving" for 2018 which could revolutionize that) Monero meanwhile seems to truly value privacy first and is decentralized, however they don't seem to be working on lowering resource requirements. Monero's take on Zcash is of course biased and I guess 6 months out of date, but still informative.
That is NOT a technical features of the cryptos, but you are allowed to try again. Also, if BTC futures work out, there is no reason not to have LTC, ETH futures later on. Not to mention that the ability to play Bitcoin without pouring money into it is a disadvantage, futures are taking investor money away from Bitcoin.
Thanks for the summary, I was too lazy to try to find it. The bottom line here is that we have to be careful with the original claims, almost always never completely true, as the examples of Bitcoin and Dash show. I think the only true competitor to Monero right now is Cardano, but we still have to see if it works like it was intended.
I think once ethereum moves to proof of stake, that point is moot. In fact, are these new coins just proof of stake coins?
State of the exchanges. Binance is fine. I had a browser problem Kraken. Now level one verified but not level two yet so cannot send any money. Gemini. Returned a $1000 deposit as it was not sent by swift one day service. Deposits are returned if three or five day service is used. I did read on reddit that they want a $5 test deposit first. I don't remember this from the instructions I saw. Bitstamp. Back to normal now after delays. Deposits are being credited within one day.