First movers advantage, BTC as the first crypto and LTC as the first accepted alt.
Find another alt that has pumped, crashed ~60%. Then sustainably risen again (Not spiked). Not to mention one thats main feature is better implemented by other tech. Have fun.
The flaw in this argument IMO is in dismissing the "anon" sector as not being independent enough to sustain an altcoin in its own right.
It remains to be seen whether that analysis is justified because if so, you might as well write off the entire market sector.
For me, that analysis isn't the least bit justified. I think that there is a glaring market in cryptocurrencies for privacy at least because it is the one - possibly only - area in which crypto is blown away by the fiat system. Complete anonymity is another thing - I've said before that these are 2 different markets and "privacy" is by far the biggest one.
Given that background, you can't dismiss a regular price correction as a "post pump" death typical of other alt coins. For a start, Darkcoin is way further down the line than that and its market price has followed a wholly different profile from coins like MOON, CINNI, AUR and even BLC. Secondly, if you look at the profile of the last 60 day revaluation, it amounts to a net 650% gain following an absolutely typical breakout / correction / consolidation pattern.
e.g.
http://goldsilver.com/article/gold-and-silver-upside-breakout/If you don't think the "anon" market exists as a well defined market sector then your remark may have some validity. On the other hand for anyone that does (and that's me amongst others) it follows that it has the potential to sustain a 'market leader' leader in the same way that the "SCRYPT Alt" or "2nd gen" sectors have done up til now.
Finally this remark
Not to mention one thats main feature is better implemented by other tech.
is desperate at best and plain nonsense at worst. The relevant phrase here is one used by the Darkcoin dev when accounting for the original basis for the project:
There is a definite need for an implementation that solves the anonymity problem with a decentralized approach and proven technology
Not the phrase proven technology. This was a conscious decision endowed with a whole lot of commercial sense because any serious technology projects manager knows that creating something is one thing, actually delivering a robust product and bringing it to market is a whole lot different. Technical integrity is a key feature of that challenge and IMO the Darkcoin developer has struck a very powerful balance between the pioneering and legacy aspects of the project - a bit like Steve Jobs did when he picked BSD Unix as the basis for his NeXT operating system instead of re-inventing that particular wheel.