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Namecoin, Devcoin, Litecoin, Liquidcoin, Solidcoin, I0coin, Ixcoin... Which of them is the best alternative to BitCoin, especially from a fledgling miner's pov (ie. I'd like to mine some coins, but have hw with very limitied abilities to do it)?
Apart from "ease of mining" - both in regards of difficulty and the blocks/timeunit - other concerns to concider may be: -Exchange-rate (to USD or BitCoins) -Deployment (are there actually anybody using it, is it accepted for payment somewhere)
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Probably the best alternative to Bitcoin would be gold. It`s fairly popular, valuable and finding some small amounts for a beginning miner should be fairly easy in some parts. It would probably require you to move closer to some rivers though...
All joking aside, you should look into using some mining pool with an option of merged mining. If mining some AltCoin would be more profitable than Bitcoin, a lot of people would switch by now and drive the price down.
You could also look into using your mining power in alternative ways. I'm assuming you have a GPU mining rig. In that case, you can look into such things as mining vanity addresses for Bitcoins (for example using my Vanity Pool).
All in all, Bitcoin is probably the main way to go nowadays, so you should concentrate on that.
Please don't abbreviate too much in your questions. Moreover, I think that this question does not follow the question guidelines - it should have some time frame for analysis, otherwise the answer can change over time. – ThePiachu – 2012-08-27T12:31:51.773
2Hi Baard! This question is way too vague. For this question to be answerable objectively you would have to clearly define "best". Are you looking for the one that would be most profitable for mining (including the hardware investment)? Even that changes a lot over a relatively short period of time so it's not a good question for StackExchange. I'll close this question if it isn't heavily improved soon. – D.H. - bitcoin.se – 2012-08-27T20:18:14.223