> none of the Altcoins currently have any use outside speculation,

I feel like this is moving goal posts. Take for instance Litecoin has a market not because it is used by various businesses but because it provides faster clearance to bitcoin exchanges (due to faster transaction times). Sure exchanges are dealing on a lower security network but they're ok taking that risk because the value they derive from it (i.e. more profits) is higher than the insurance it would cost them if something were to go wrong.

Similarly, people use Monero because it provides them with the much needed privacy features. They may anchor back in bitcoin to purchase goods, but it doesn't change the fact that the reason why Monero is valued isn't "pure speculation".

Ethereum is currently being valued like a startup, it's product are expected to be very much useful in the future. Almost none of these products really care about Ethers being used to buy and sell goods on Craigslist or on Tigerdirect for computers. Take for instance Golem.

You're claiming that only real valuation of good is if it is being used to exchange for real goods or else it is pure speculation, BECAUSE bitcoin has a clear advantage in that field. It's like Dash saying "No cryptocurrency is as good as Dash because all cryptocurrencies have long names, and only Dash has a short name, so it will be easier to adopt because the name can hang on easily on to your tongue.".

Makes me curious. If not by market cap, how would you rank them?

Liquidity is the only measure that really matters for money. One measure of liquidity/market depth could be: for how many USD can you buy/sell while only moving the price, say, 1%. To get a more detailed picture you could plot it on a graph with USD amount on one axis and slippage (price change) on the other axis.

You'd have to merge the order books of all exchanges for a particular coin, and execute the order against that. I'm fairly certain that by this measure, Bitcoin is multiple orders of magnitudes more liquid than all other crypto currencies combined.

It's hard to find objective metrics. I would look at real-world usage and utility. The currencies fall in a very clear distribution there -- bitcoin and all others.

The ole e-commerce metric. Does anyone else hate when they have tunnel vision for years and are made aware of a really amazing opportunity they should have noticed earlier?

Many crypto tokens are dividend producing assets, just like most separate corporate bonds have yields.

Sure there may be somebody wishing the dutch east india company's bonds were successful in underpinning global finance for 500 years, but the reality is that it pioneered a high yielding asset class.

In crypto, there are investible assets, and many people want them as they can gain decent yield from them. Those networks don't require mass transactions per block to be valuable. But you can also create applications on those networks to make them even more valuable.

Fascinating analogy. Are you saying that the rise in Bitcoin's value recently is driven not by speculation so much as more people realizing Bitcoin's true value as an investible asset? And where are the yields coming from if not speculation ... ICOs?

Many cryptocurrencies have found ways to economically incentive "full nodes" without being subject to sybil attacks (one actor pretending to be multiple computers). They do this by requiring the node to have a balance of that currency, and lets them earn as miners (making it prohibitively expensive to sybil). Similar to proof of stake but different.

This makes their networks more secure quicker as well as turning nodes into investments in themselves. The amount of that currency you can earn in a year is the yield. This promotes price appreciation on the markets, and for those fearing mass dumps and market corrections it is prudent to realize that node operators all have different time horizons, just like any dividend investor in stocks.

This is all complementary to whatever else you would like to use those networks for.

With yields being around 8% annually, there is plenty of room for other market participants to discover these networks and accept lower yields.

Key words to look for are Supernodes, harvesting, masternodes, staking

When any network with those things become valuable and liquid enough then ICOs can happen with those currencies being the funding mechanism for the next leg up.

Each of these phenomenons have to be evaluated individually, for their interesting and their most dubious aspects. Yes many ICOs are organizations with no more backing than the blue skies of Kansas, but they don't have to be dubios. It helps to see the ecosystem as a whole, and this ecosystem is a new evolution of capital formation.

But to actually answer your questions that are tailored to bitcoin, I would say bitcoins recent rise has nothing to do with that. Cryptocurrencies' rise is though.

Understood, thanks for your informative replies.