I see an oversaturation of the market with a lot of alt coins with redundant utility which tells me at some point many of them will be wiped off the board and lots of people will lose money. Fr every day currency/transactions by far the best choices are XLM and XRP - these are insanely fast coins that are totally instant; that maters when you are at a cash register paying for coffee. Coins like ETH and LTC are a hybrid or an improvement in utility over BTC; they can handle more transactions but the coin count actually doesn't come into play for this since you can deal in fractions. The sad part is that for an everyday coin the number one criteria is stability, so you need a coin that doesn't fluctuate too much otherwise there is too much uncertainty and its utility is diminished. I think there will be investment coins (such as BTC / ETH) and everyday spending coins with large market caps such as XRP and XLM in order to cope with the large amount of transactions. As far as government coins, several countries have already expressed interest in making their own (such as Russia and Venezuela) - the US is probably not too far behind in discussing that sort of approach though it would be a really giant shift and most likely it would become just the crypto dollar which would be backed by the dollar (which is basically what "Tether" or USDT is) so it provides stability without growth/loss.
That's interesting, and I can see a parallel marketplace between useful coins for daily life and coins for investment.
But if you're correct about government getting into creating their own cryptos for daily life, then the more important distinction to anticipate will be:
1) Gov't cryptos for sanctioned daily use
2) Underground cryptos for criminal/unregulated/unsanctioned use
Because if gov'ts create their own cryptos, then those everyday currently unregulated fast spending coins like XRP and will XLM have no usefulness. They will be replaced by the gov't ones.
In that case, the best investment long term are the cryptos that are not fastest, but the most decentralized, secure, and established, as they are most likely to be of continuing use to the criminal world, which I expect as stated previously will continue to be the backbone of this economy.
Even if gov'ts potentially create their own cryptos (which I am still skeptical will happen in any reasonable timeframe...), people will still need BTC/LTC/ETH or similar technologies for the underground economy. In that case, it seems reasonable to expect that the biggest players now will still be the biggest players for that in 5 years as well.
