I think an important piece of information to remember is that most (any?) of these coins can be hard-forked - and with a strong enough marketing machine behind the hard fork, can create as many bajillion more coins that are nearly identical as the "original", pre-fork coins. I don't know if that makes a real difference to this discussion, but I think it does. If the traditional markets, investors, businesses, and mom-pop shops continue with crypto F.O.M.O., these forked coins are likely to become manipulative tools to suck more fiat out of people.
Doesn't work that way. After the Dao, I had ETH and ETC. After Segwit went dumb, I had BTC and BCH. A "strong enough marketing machine behind the hard fork" means that the value of one coin or another increases. Everybody who was in it before already has everything available. Sure, maybe they sell it to the people who don't but the way forking works is anyone pre-fork has assets on both forks.
Ah, yes - I knew that! But had forgotten. I was sure I was missing something but wrote anyways. Thank you for correcting me :) Even so, I still feel that being able to double (or whatever the fork decides) the amount of "valid" coins in circulation - even if they're forked coins, on a different mining network, with different code, etc. etc. etc. - with a 'simple' fork critically undermines the claim that cryptocurrencies (bitcoin in particular) and their holders will benefit from deflationary supply. Which means that we end up trusting each other that forked coins won't be dumped into markets, or used to manipulate systems, and then we end up back where we started - having to trust that people won't fuck with the "trust-less" blockchains.
Well, look at the way it works. Let's say there's 100 miners mining HubskiCoin. There's a fight amongst the factions because some people think the color scheme should be "clean" while some think it should be "asphalt." So there's a fork - 35 of them go and mine "asphalt" while 65 of them mine "clean." Everybody with holdings in HubskiCoin now has 35% of their holdings in HubskiDark. Even the guys mining HubskiDark still hold all their HubskiCoin. But now their mining efforts are being rewarded in HubskiDark, not HubskiCoin. Their pool is 35. HubskiCoin only has 65 miners but they represent the majority stake. If they can attract new miners, they have a bigger network. But look - If HubskiDark attracts seven miners and HubskiCoin attracts seven miners, there's 114 miners. You don't get to double-mine. Every single miner could fork off the network and there'd still only be 100 miners. Mining capacity does not change. Total hash of all combined networks is the same as total hash of the pre-forked network. It's not like everyone gets to summon network availability out of thin air. Forks are very different than ICOs - most every ICO out there is effectively a "subroutine" running on the Ethereum "program." Their hashes and shit are part of the payload of Ethereum mining.