I hope Evan can work in IP obfuscation, as Anonymint suggested. Then it would be hard to challenge DRK in any foreseeable way.
I like this idea, I think we could go open source much sooner while remaining the leading privacy-centric crypto.
First we need a market to populate darkcoin and after open source.
The transparent market is the only shop in town so far. Everyone has to opt for their shop because ...it's the only one around. It's a monopoly with 100% marketshare for all transparent coins.
An anonymous coin breaks the 7bn transparent market by giving users a new choice: Anonymity and Privacy.
In terms of growth and decline potential, things are fairly straightforward. When you have 1 established shop with 100% marketshare and a new one comes with 0% marketshare, it can go only one way... the 100% will gravitate lower and the 0% will rise / grow. The growth potential from 0 to 1% to 5% to 10% is the market you are aiming for, and that market already exists and it will continue to grow as governments escalate their crackdown on transparent coins and as users become increasingly aware of how transparent their bitcoin transactions are.
Anonymous coins can even be a hedge to negative news of the type "oh they banned Bitcoin - again", in which case you have your primary investment (Bitcoin) fall and the hedge investment (Darkcoin) rise. The reason is that what is negative news for the transparent markets could be interpreted as positive news for the anonymous market which is not regulated or does not seek regulation.
So far, due to their close affinity, all coins behave more-or-less in the same direction when bad news hit Bitcoin. But this can change in the future and have similar effects in cryptocurrency valuation as there is in FOREX where, say, USD failures ensure EUR rising and vice versa.