This whole line of argument is largely hypothetical and falls apart for 3 reasons:

[1] - whatever other 'technologies' and cryptocurrencies exist, monetarily speaking the highest value proposition is a successful bitcoin clone that supports private transactions and maximum fungibility. That means some kind of optimal compromise between bitcoin and and anonymous network layer = Darkcoin's design priorities. Sure, have your "high tech" but don't expect "high cap".

[2] - the subtext of smooth's line of propaganda is that the masternode network is some kind of 'static' network that represents a fixed target which can be progressively 'bought'. It isn't. Masternodes are simply wallet daemons. They are as decentralised as any other wallet daemon in that *every* part of the coin supply supports them. Any wallet can operate in 'masternode' mode and new ones can and are set up continuously.

[3] - the technology's now a year into development. Despite being open sourced and probably one of the most investigated , attacked and 'fudded' out there, it's never yet been compromised. Meanwhile all these attacks only serve to harden the architecture with every successive code release. Add to that the fact that the blockchain itself inherits Bitcoin's full confidence value and you have a much more optimal balance of anonymity, value proposition, adoption and financial security than you do with any cryptonote coin