In my opinion, all alt currencies in their current state are still just in the shadow of BitCoin and forever will be.  People only care about how many of their coin can be turned into BTC to be turned into FIAT.  No one really cares about their coin because you can't head to the store and buy anything with it!

If DigitalCoin wants to become its own identity if needs to be able to transfer DGC<->FIAT as easily as we can BitCoin on CoinBase.  Using these third parties payers in other countries to get around the law is a pain in the ass, should be able to send $100 from my bank over to CryptoAve and get $100 worth of DGC in my account like CoinBase.  Yeah yeah, then CryptoAve would be a bank and fall under regulation.  Paypal gets around this in America, figure out what they've done.

What would make DigitalCoin surpass BitCoin is if baritus managed to get some capitol and funded his own DigitalCoin debit card processing directly from your CryptoAve account.  The day I can mine $20 and walk out to a restaurant and buy my meal that same day is the same day BitCoin is toppled.  I'd happily accept baritus's processing fees for a currency that can be mined.  Problem is of course how to keep the flow of FIAT coming into CryptoAve versus flowing out, but Visa, MasterCard, and American Express have figured it out.

Sure, some places are now experimenting with BitCoin, but I'm sure they're just immediately cashing out to FIAT and aren't taking it seriously.

I only fear that once ASIC come out for Scrypt then it would totally fubar up DigitalCoin.  I'm sure the ASIC will fubar up LiteCoin first and then move down to the other Scrypt coins.