Dash is not even remotely competitive. It is simply and purely a scam to steal money from the foolish and ignorant. The market cap of dash is an illusion created by temporarily removing most of the supply into masternodes which monitor all the transactions and insure that 90% of the network traffic goes through NSA controlled routers. When the scam bubble pops all of those masternodes will get liquidated in a huge rush to the exits, crushing all the innocent holders.
Foolish they may be, but I don't think the holders are so innocent. DASH is best understood as a novel
transparent Ponzi scheme. Duffield used to openly talked about crunching supply for the sake of raising the price so it's hardly a nefarious secret. Even today their marketing consists of creepy infomercial-like presentations designed to reel in new users. But the key is that those users go in consciously hoping to pull off the same on future buyers.