In your opinion (iamnotback's) if you earned an average income and where going to "invest" $1000 on a semi-speculative play (ie, its a bit of money, not ideal to have it go to 0, but not a major crisis either) and you where going to put it into one of the following:
Bitcoin
Monero
Dash
PrivX
MaidSafeCoin
What coin would you chose?
This is my opinion, so please feel free to consult with others. For now, I would invest 80% in Bitcoin and 20% in Monero but that is not a prediction of whether the price will go up or down. If you want potentially more upside (also downside), you might weight more to Monero, but since I think you want to be reasonably conservative then I suggest those weightings.
And I am not factoring in hype mastery, which Dash seems to somehow be very good at. Or maybe they are buying their own token, manipulating the market. I don't know.
And if my project reaches its stated goals and is not just some vaporware and meets your requirements at that time in the future, then I would consider adding to the list you invest in.
I haven't been following Zcash past few months, but that anonymity seemed to be a high quality alternative, but there were other problems with the distribution and such.