I suppose it might look like that to someone parachuting into this thread or even following it for any length of time.

I was in your shoes when the whole Blackcoin mania started taking off in the middle of last year (or was it 2 years ago - it's a distant memory). I got shocked at the amount of 'fanboy' mania that was going on in that thread and started posting what would probably have been considered FUD by them but what I considered to be genuine challenges to their optimism.

The reason I thought they were all so deluded was because, having just discovered 'POS' (Proof of Stake) they all thought they were onto the new hold grail, whereas POS was old hat. Peercoin had it, NxT had it etc. Blackcoin just had a bit of a buzz at the time and they all thought it was going to be the next Bitcoin.

I don't feel the same about Darkcoin / DASH.

For a start, its a genuine original in many aspects. The 2-tier approach is a bold yet obvious move because any network that's service oriented is going to have a huge amount of technical options available to it that monotier networks just don't. I realise we get attacked left right and centre for that but I never get convinced by any of the arguments - they all revolve around some totally misplaced notion of the concept of 'centralisation' (as I've discussed in that quoted post above).

Apart from that, this project has done justice to its original design priorities - whatever you think of their merits. It has survived a year long hammering from genuine competition, fudsters, technical setbacks and commercial challenges to emerge as a top 5 crypto. That in itself endorses my original instinct about where this project was going.

So I don't make any apologies for making generally favourable posts in this thread - even though they may get characterised as 'cultish' by adversarial contributors. It's just the 'nature of the beast'.

Maybe we should all break out into spontaneous bikkering and confrontation once in a while to make the 'spectators' feel more comfortable - but then again, that would deny some of them a fulfilling hobby