I'm going with Bitcoin as well. 99.9% of the altcoins I look at are get rich quick schemes from the devs which produced it, and/or have major security flaws. As soon as you get around to pointing out these enormous security flaws, they're onto the next crap coin.
Most Altcoins / Forkcoins suffer from some serious flaws I've noticed and I'll point out below:
Bigger block sizes / Shorter block times
To the simplistic technologist or noob, this sounds great. Bitcoin is the 'Dinosaur' which can't upgrade. However, there are several cumulative negative factors of centralisation introduced by these ideas:
* Larger initial download size of the Blockchain for nodes, increasing market barrier to entry (Assuming that they got to Bitcoin's historical use and volume)
* Larger Hard Drive space required for storage of the Blockchain
* Larger amount of Bandwidth per month required to keep a node running
* Increased market barrier for miners with lower speed internet connections, still downloading the current block, while other miners are already hashing that block
Tragedy of the Commons
Phrase which refers to a limited resource being overused to the point of failure. The traditional analogy is of a paddock with too many livestock feeding on the limited amount of grass on the field. After a while the grass is consumed and the paddock turns to mud and much of the livestock die. With cryptocurrencies, they can increase their speed or size on the base layer to the point where you only have to trust a few participants, however this system now requires equal trust to the traditional banking system with similar security risks.
Bitcoin's limited Blocksize and long block time enable it to establish a market cost on the limited resource (Block space). It is important that there is a cost on the base layer, because it is a limited resource, and people would overwhelmingly chuck junk inefficiently down it if there weren't (As previously observed). As a result of cost, participants begin to use the base layer more efficiently (Now being observed). On top of this, you can build systems which allow the transaction of Bitcoin many times quicker and cheaper than could be possible on the base. This is identical to how TCP/IP for the Internet scaled. The base layer is a broadcast common layer for participants, and the upper layers enable more directional greater features on top of the base. Many, many payments can then be conducted cheaply, while still being on top of the Bitcoin base layer