If you don't want to miss out again, buy Litecoins and Namecoins. Litecoin will never be worth as much as BTC (because there will be 80million of them as opposed to 20something million BTC) but it will slowly gain in value as it has some impressive features especially suited for online gaming payments with fast confirmation, secure online voting apps, or of course online gambling.
Litecoin is presently $1.30/each I see that going up to $4 at least by end of year now that more people are using it.
I am a fan of cryptocurrency in principle, but not of this particular oversimplification that was borrowed from some very sloppy thinking on the part of gold enthusiasts.
Limited supply does not reliably ensure certain price behavior independent of demand.
Is there any acceptance in commerce of these competitors? Unless there is an underlying demand created by available products, these coins will be worth nothing.
In my opinion, features won't matter. Bitcoin has critical mass, and it's unlikely to face real competition.
There's also PPcoin a low energy coin compatible with BTC miners that's getting more popular.
Another advantage to Litecoin is you don't see it in the news everyday with the words 'Drugs' and 'Blackmarket' beside it, meaning correspondent banks will still deal with you if you want to set up an exchange whereas a lot of banks now are dumping bitcoin startups out of paranoia
You should qualify that with the word "yet". Is there anything in Litecoin's design that doesn't allow it to be used for drugs and by black markets? No. Honestly, Litecoin doesn't even have that going for it. Acceptance as an actual currency is the difference between a cryptocurrency becoming a legitimate investment versus a speculative pump-and-dump scheme.
I assume that mining will tend to be modestly profitable. As Bitcoin scales up and as the reward goes down, either it will have to increase transaction fees and use an enormous amount of energy, or the mining reward will be too low compared to Bitcoin's value, there won't be enough miners, and 51% attacks will start to be profitable.
This isn't a problem for PPcoin, which gradually transitions to proof-of-stake instead of proof-of-work. It seems to me like it'd be more viable as a major currency.
I'm sure there are a lot of other "oops" and "fuck" moments in many bitcoin watchers' moments. If you can laugh about it, then more power to you. From what I've read, when they first came out, they were very hard to obtain and people were actually excluded from it (is this true?), so someone must have seen the value. I first came across it on github in late 2009 when searching for project ideas but skipped over it as some type of scam. Others only saw value in building bitcoin apps, rather than simply holding the coins.
What are you looking at now?
This isn't 1941 England and bitcoins aren't sugar. Early adopters in the right thing often make money. Usually on HN they are called investors and congratulated. Sour grapes on missing out? (I did too)