Litecoin is following Dogecoin's footsteps bro...straight to Davy Jones locker..
Dogecoin was more of a joke than anything.
Litecoin has the second largest market cap with the second largest daily volume trades. It dwarfs any other coin currently out in the market.
No coin even comes close. It's far from dead...
Darkcoin surpassed litecoin in price. The only reason Litecoin has a large marketcap is because it has 28million coins. It's only worth $8 and is only getting lower and lower, after dropping more than 80% from $50.
Litecoin has no adoptance, no innovation, and no first mover status(many alt coins were made before litecoin). Litecoin is as good as dead.
Darkcoin is an insta-mined, over hyped, pump and dump scheme. Sure, the prices are almost the same (with Litecoin leading by a few cents), but how long do you think that will last? Don't get me wrong. I like the idea of Darkcoin, anonymity and such, however, it has wayy too many red flags for investors to be excited about it. For example, the issues the dev team with the masternodes. They hard forked and still couldn't get it right...
So, if Darkcoin is your alternative suggestion, I'm gonna have to stick with Litecoin.