I have no base, other than that someone was 2 years ahead of someone else who manage to create a fork of that work. The monero guys probably didn't even have a clue that anonymity was the shiet until darkcoin showed them, and after that they wanted to make a quick buck and go down in history books as the 'inventors of the modern "new age" anonymous economy' pfft.
I was aware of Bitcoin privacy issues since learning about Bitcoin in 2011.
I was aware of DarkCoin since its genesis block. A lot of people who were technologically ill-informed were pumping it at the Texas conference earlier this year.
However, I have never been aware that DarkCoin afforded any privacy (not even talking about anonymity at this point), because its approaches are naive. All the recent "MasterNode" discussion and RCX code is only convincing me moreso of this. So, I never invested or became involved in DarkCoin.
Alright. But seriously, monero appeared only some weeks after bytecoin got introduced to the forum. It's nothing more than a fork, it didn't even bring a GUI to the users.
I agree with you about darkcoin. But at the time it was launched, it was considered the first attempt to make a anonymous crypto, and the developer has showed us a lot of devotion and creative work.