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If you go to https://coinmarketcap.com/ you will see they have info on over 600 individual crypto currencies. 99% of them are going to be worthless long term. Best case scenario a handful of them survive. I'd be extremely skeptical of any coin that distributes coins via an ICO or "pre-sale" instead of via competitive mining like Bitcoin.

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Mining is a waste of energy. An ICO makes sense if they 1) have a product that benefits from a blockchain, 2) have a great team and a demo of their product.

Mining doesn't waste energy, it's the cost the network pays for security, and it usefully indexes the value of the token rewarded to miners for securing the network to their cost of electricity, grounding the token value in some hard-to-manipulate real-world value.

It wastes energy compared to POS (Proof of Stake).

Is there a working implementation of POS yet?

It will likely happen this year with Tezos. Ethereum will eventually use POS as well.

So, no.

Depends if you count the test nets I suppose.

As a layman which also thinks of mining as a waste of engery (although it seems necessary as the other commenter pointed out) I hope gridcoin [0] or something similiar takes off.

[0] http://www.gridcoin.us/

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