It was extremely funny and interesting to see and even take part in the birth of a block chain. I guess any new fork will have even less success unless it adds something really new.
Watching these alternative chains launch has helped me to learn a lot about bitcoin. They also make great 'test' nets in some ways.
I learned that what I was hoping to learn wasn't going to happen the way I had hoped. Bitcoin started out in obscurity and grew very slowly for a long time. Since I already knew how to mine solo, getting a client set up and configured was trivial. Grabbing a bunch of blocks early was nice, but when I started getting a bunch of rejects I knew the honeymoon was over, everyone else had finally gotten on to and was outpacing the difficulty. It was like the first 2 years of bitcoin discovery, growth, and explosive expansion compressed into about 4 hours. When you can go from genesis blocks to extracting and selling coins on an exchange in 12-16 hours it gave a bit of perspective, but not really a genuine experience.
