My view of all these cryptocurrencies is that the math and CS they're originally based on is pretty cool, and they do provide a proof of concept of a rather dif

My view of all these cryptocurrencies is that the math and CS they're originally based on is pretty cool, and they do provide a proof of concept of a rather difficult distributed consensus task. But all the speculation right now cares about none of that. They only care about optimizing how quickly people can be convinced to throw money at the coin. They don't need to do the math right, they just need it to sound right. IOTA is a prime example. IOTA does cryptography like a literal cargo cult does aviation. They just went through the motions without understanding what they're doing. They rolled their own hash function, in ternary for some dumb reason. It turned out to be vulnerable to attacks known for decades the moment a cryptographer looked at it. The spin they've come up with after that indicates that they don't fundamentally understand why not to roll your own crypto, especially not a hash function. They are amateurs, screwing around. Any research you've read in distributed consensus, I guarantee you that the IOTA team doesn't understand it. The fact that you included IOTA in your list undermines the credibility of your entire list, and makes me at least think that you haven't applied your expertise in consensus systems to looking at what these coins actually do. More information: https://www.media.mit.edu/posts/iota-response/ https://www.media.mit.edu/posts/iota-response/