The fact that you mentioned Monero (MRO) is interesting. The current narrative in the alt-coin community is "privacy," which was further reinforced by Darkcoin's recent moon shot. But Darkcoin was illegitimately pre-mined, has closed-source binaries, is not
technologically innovative, and has a volatility-enhancing block reward equation
1. Darkcoin will likely collapse, some will call it a scam, and others will say they shouldn't have invested in something they didn't understand.
1. There was ZERO premine. The argument is about the fairness of the distribution to the first miners who got a disproportionate amount of coins. Yet, precisely because of this factor, they sold them for pennies because they didn't value them, hence the distribution was one of the best among altcoins (until the heavy accumulation phase in April/May).
2. Darkcoin is opensource. Those who want to use DarkSend can opt for the binary. DarkSend source will be opensourced in a month or so, after being finalized (RC status).
3. It is innovative as it covers a need that is not covered by existing transparent coins.
4. You too don't understand it, but claim that you do.
5. The whitepaper is old, the spec has evolved.
But like Satoshi said, "we are pattern-seeking story-telling animals." The privacy narrative will remain, and in an effort to avoid the pitfalls of Darkcoin, Monero may appear as the legitimate alternative. Monero is an open-source clone of
Bytecoin so the
technology has a track record.
It does not *really* have a track record because nobody actually used it en mass. It was like used by a few dozen people, unlike Bitcoin's blockchain which does have a track record.
Usability, scaling, basic functionality, interoperability - all have issues for mainstream adoption, and some stuff like scaling problems might render it DOA (dead on arrival). That's in addition to the fact that the dev team of MRO is not the team responsible for developing the back-end / core implementation and as such being less experienced to maintaining it.
On a final note, I think people speculating in alt-coins should look at it more like short-term human psychology analysis rather than long-term investing. I worry that a lot of the people in the Darkcoin, Blackcoin, XRP, Nxt, etc. threads really believe those coins' ledgers have long-term potential.
LTC has a 300mn marketcap and sitting where it is because of branding itself as the silver to bitcoin's gold.
DRK covers a real world need that LTC (or BTC) cannot cover. It is superior to LTC technologically, safer, more private, scarcer by a ratio of 1:7, has 1/10th inflation (2880 coins per day vs 28.800) and pays its users who allocated 1000 DRKs for running a supernode, for providing the anonymity service (Proof of Service).
There is no single reason why LTC should be higher than DRK in the long run. It seems like a dinosaur in comparison.
1The Darkcoin block reward decreases with increasing network hashrate and increases with decreasing network hashrate. This tends to further limit new coin supply during rallies (adding to the pump), and increase new coin supply when miners have lost interest (adding to the dump).
Minimum block reward 5, so after a point it can't go lower. It's not proportional to the pump.
Unfortunately, there's too much misunderstanding regarding Darkcoin. Big investors have made their homework, apparently, but some people are quick to judge without knowing the facts.
http://wiki.darkcoin.euhttp://wiki.darkcoin.eu/wiki/FAQ...for info.