Wow this makes a lot of sense. I personally believe that this is yet again another one of BTC's large dips that will eventually recover onto it's upwards path.
But then if people panic and see how hard it is to get back into fiat from BTC won't they just go into relatively stable altcoins instead? For example DOGE is skyrocketing as we speak and it's USD price was totally unaffected by BTC's recent plummet. http://coinmarketcap.com/
More like 4th, given that Ripples can't be mined, is controlled by a single entity, most of the existing coins are not freely circulating, and the transaction volume is consistently so tiny that it looks very much like the price is intentionally manipulated to make the coin look desirable.
More like 3rd. In the 8 hours since vidarh posted this, Dogecoin surpassed the Peercoin market cap. The 24h trading volume of Dogecoin is also nearly 6x that of Peercoin right now.
Really that means nothing though. Neither Peercoin or Dogecoin have merchant or payment processor support. No one is interested in taking dogecoin in payment for goods and services, right now it is just a toy coin that people can use to learn about cryptocurrencies cheaply and that is pretty much what it will always be. If dogecoin had a maleability issue it does not have the dev support to resolve it in a reasonable time frame, a fork like there was in BTC last year would have a similar result. There are lost of transactions because you can send 10 or 100 or 1000 coins to anyone and you still have sent less than a few bucks. Lots of transactions does not equal a big currency it equals a lot of transactions. And in this situation these transactions count for very little economic activity.
There isn't really any development team comparable to that of Bitcoin in a different coin. Things that get fixed in Bitcoin are not fixed in other coins. But if another coin happens to fix something, it will be fixed in Bitcoin too.
Typically a copycoin will only have the same fixes as Bitcoin depending on when they decided to copy it. But then they will invariably lag behind.
It is quite short sighted to think that all digital currencies are "forked" from bitcoin: see http://www.openudc.org/ for instance:
"The OpenUDC softwares are designed to manage a free money system as described by the TRM (Théorie Relative de la Monnaie), that means a money system where no human has privileges in front of money creation either in time or in space."
The concept is therefore quite different from BTC which clearly gives some people a huge privilege in front of money creation in time
But then if people panic and see how hard it is to get back into fiat from BTC won't they just go into relatively stable altcoins instead? For example DOGE is skyrocketing as we speak and it's USD price was totally unaffected by BTC's recent plummet. http://coinmarketcap.com/