user1807: Namecoin, Devcoin, Litecoin, Liquidcoin, Solidcoin, I0coin, Ixcoin... Which of them is the best alternative to BitCoin, especially from a fledgling miner's pov (ie. I'd like to mine some coins, but have hw with very limitied abilities to do it)?
Apart from "ease of mining" - both in regards of difficulty and the blocks/timeunit - other concerns to concider may be:
-Exchange-rate (to USD or BitCoins)
-Deployment (are there actually anybody using it, is it accepted for payment somewhere)

user323: Probably the best alternative to Bitcoin would be gold. It`s fairly popular, valuable and finding some small amounts for a beginning miner should be fairly easy in some parts. It would probably require you to move closer to some rivers though...
All joking aside, you should look into using some mining pool with an option of merged mining. If mining some AltCoin would be more profitable than Bitcoin, a lot of people would switch by now and drive the price down.
You could also look into using your mining power in alternative ways. I'm assuming you have a GPU mining rig. In that case, you can look into such things as mining vanity addresses for Bitcoins (for example using my Vanity Pool).
All in all, Bitcoin is probably the main way to go nowadays, so you should concentrate on that.

1807: <p>Namecoin, Devcoin, Litecoin, Liquidcoin, Solidcoin, I0coin, Ixcoin... Which of them is the best alternative to BitCoin, especially from a fledgling miner's pov (ie. I'd like to mine some coins, but have hw with very limitied abilities to do it)?</p>

<p>Apart from "ease of mining" - both in regards of difficulty and the blocks/timeunit - other concerns to concider may be:
-Exchange-rate (to USD or BitCoins)
-Deployment (are there actually anybody using it, is it accepted for payment somewhere)</p>
 323: <p>Probably the best alternative to Bitcoin would be gold. It`s fairly popular, valuable and finding some small amounts for a beginning miner should be fairly easy in some parts. It would probably require you to move closer to some rivers though...</p>

<p>All joking aside, you should look into using some mining pool with an option of merged mining. If mining some AltCoin would be more profitable than Bitcoin, a lot of people would switch by now and drive the price down.</p>

<p>You could also look into using your mining power in alternative ways. I'm assuming you have a GPU mining rig. In that case, you can look into such things as mining vanity addresses for Bitcoins (for example using my <a href="https://vanitypool.appspot.com/" rel="nofollow">Vanity Pool</a>).</p>

<p>All in all, Bitcoin is probably the main way to go nowadays, so you should concentrate on that.</p>
