Maybe they should fork it into a ponycoin. I feel sorry for the people who listened to Rptelia.
Well, the problem was there was the slew of moderated threads which possibly gave uninitiated people a false sense of the situation.
However, in the grand scheme of things, while the Rptelia followers may have lost a lot of dosh speculating on Monero short term in the longer term I agree with Fluffy that things like the dev team, infrastructure and community make a big difference. Merchants and buyers would prefer security and stability over 'day trading'. What Monero needs above and beyond a high price is what all the Alts need with the exception of BTC and Ripple - that is, easy to use fiat exchanges and easy to use open source shopping cart payment modules. When this happens I can see a big uptake in Monero, Bytecoin and a few other alts.
Anonymous cryptocurrencies will be first driven mainly by speculation. As the price stays more and more stable, speculation will turn into simple offshore cash storage. You can buy bitcoins that will not be traced to you. Isn't that a killer application? What other feature is worth mentioning in other altcoins that can compete with this one? I know its nice to have coins to do chat, or have cool memes, different mining algos etc. but everything can be done using bitcoin or if you require anonymity monero or darkcoin. sure, at this stage i don't see many competitors in this market. zerocash will come. so we have three competitors. Not too many and we can be sure that anonymity is not something that can a big corporation or central banks compete with creating a better altcoin.
If you add up all the marketcaps of these currencies, it seems temptingly low. Once the big run up in bitcoin starts, these anonymous coins will outperform.