I think what you listed is marketing fluff.
Things I am looking out for:
a) Contributes some sort of additional benefit on the part of the computations being performed, e.g. seti@home
b) Backed by a physical medium such as gold
c) Very anonymous as opposed to public
I think the future will involve many different crypto currencies. There could be compelling business reasons for a company to issue their own currencies.
For example, lets presume there is a cloud AI brain. You can send inquiries to this brain for complex questions you have. This AI is composed of the miners. Like BTC you either can purchase to "AI Coins" or mine them.
In this respect the crypto currency could create its own self-sustaining entity with a real value. Yet it would not really owned by anyone. If the currency got too expensive, at some point you could have a competitor and the prices would balance out.
Speculators can fuck themselves, in the literal sense. For example, the dot com/domain name market had a handful of people buy up most of the good generic domain names. They parked them and earned pay per click revenue from Google and Yahoo. Google realized how much traffic was coming from "direct navigation" and basically put an end to type in domain traffic (and arguably consumers were trained to go elsewhere.) Had these domain names been developed in to good businesses rather than sat on, we would actually expect to see a good web site behind (insert keyword).com. When Google started hijacking the browser there would have been many more complainers.
BTC and other crypto-currencies right now have an outsized proportion of speculators verses those who are actually doing things. When prices rise, you get rich just by buying. Why devote any of your work to anything other than buying?
Right now the best thing that can happen for BTC and crypto-currency is for people to build software that uses it and actually works. Marketing is just painting the same thing over in a new color.
