Regardless of what the price will do from now (down, sideways, up) some of the fundamentals of DRK to keep in mind:
1. Dark is aiming for the private/anonymous market. If just 1 out of 10 transactions are held privately/anonymously in the future, the anonymous coins will hold at least 10% of the whole cryptocurrency marketcap (so ~750mn out of 7.5bn with running prices). That leaves plenty of room for growth.
2. It provides real-world utility and stuff that people can actually use. Some of the top10 cryptos in coinmarketcap have some "fancy" concepts and features that most people do not even understand what they are what they do why they are useful. Privacy is something that everyone understands and has a need for in some degree.
2. Low inflation: BTC gives out 3600 BTCs per day. LTC gives out 28.800 BTC per day. DRK produces only 2880 BTC per day - and it will lower 7% next year.
3. Due to low inflation a significantly smaller amount of fiat (or fiat equivalent in BTCs) is required to keep the price stable compared to either LTC or BTC.
4. Due to low production of coins, coupled with the coins held for masternodes, the buying pressure for existing coins escalates.
5. BTC and LTC holders may hedge some of their investments with DRK, as DRK makes its ascent and scares them. Large bagholders of LTC in particular may have problems sleeping well and will either sell LTC or hedge with DRK. This creates a feedback loop that narrows the gap between LTC/DRK as money from LTC flows to DRK, allowing DRK to go to #2.
6. DRK represents a hedge of various forms. For example its security is not dependent on only 1 hash. It is also a bad-news-hedge in the sense that when news like "Bitcoin was banned in X country" hit, it can go the opposite way of Bitcoin. Kind'a like USD/EUR pairs when USD goes bad and EUR goes up and vice versa. Fiat hedging for BTC is unrealistic because it's a binary market. You either have BTC or fiat.
7. The numbers of coins in circulation is heavily in favor of DRK, in terms of scarcity: ~4 million DRKs vs ~12mn BTCs vs ~28mn LTCs.
8. Coin-numbers-adjusted, the price of DRK is 1/6th of LTC and 1/120th of BTC. This is grossly undervalued if one assumes that at least 5 or 10% of cryptocurrency transactions will be performed privately/anonymously and thus the price should move upwards to reflect this fact.
9. The possibility of "mining" with masternodes, is like buying a mining ring that is free (you don't actually pay it as you still keep your DRKs) but also not obsoleted with time or new technology. Beats GPU ASICs investment in both CAPEX and OPEX.
10. DRK is ahead of the competition. The competition has severe weaknesses and "blocker" issues. Zerocoin is the best solution but doesn't exist - and if it does come out, there will be a huge trust issue with the initial key. Bytecoin has good anonymity as a mixer but is based on an unproven/untested blockchain technology and consequently people can't trust much money on it, compared to the 5 years of running of Bitcoin. It also scales badly and has usability issues which will hamper it for quite some time.
11. DRK has a coder that codes. Darkcoin has become something like a development platform of new features instead of a regular "shitcoin"-clone.
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