You could have bought almost 10k DRK back in the day for a single Bitcoin, tell me how much that is worth now?
The lowest you could buy Darkcoin for was around .001 to .002. The first real exchange it was on was Poloniex and was pumped almost immediately to that point. It was basically not possible or unfeasible to mine due to all the issues I listed in this post:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=560138.msg6719823#msg6719823So that means 99% of people who wanted anything to do with this coin were forced to buy in at .001 - .002 while the developer and a couple of his friends who flash mined it with Amazon instances, no windows release, and block rewards "erroneously" set to 500 instead of 50 owned everything.
These are the 100% honest to truth Darkcoin facts, as I have witnessed this coin since it's first arrival on exchanges.
There was a couple days interval before they pumped it to .001-.002, but at that point, people didn't know if the coin was even going to continue as is, or just be abandoned or re-launched due to it's failed launch with block rewards set to 500 instead of 50.
Don't lie! I bought @ 0.0005 at Poloniex, and it wasn't even a lucky dump catch nor the beginning.
Beside, you had the fair opportunity to buy for ~ 0.000025 on the forum using escrow. Check your facts before spreading FUD.
Whether Darkcoin was designed to be a scam from the start, or just accidentally happens to be one of the worst launches in crypto history where block rewards are accidentally set 10x higher than they should be, this coin will obviously be cloned and re-released as a scrypt, keccak, or groestl coin with a more valid launch.
Even if it is cloned - once open sourced - any copy will be always several steps behind, without the dev, and will fail, same like 99% of other Bitcoin clones which brought nothing to the table.
I genuinely don't understand such a hate for something which brings something new and helps the whole scene.