Darkcoin has better tech than most coins and is still in the dumps. The notion that even Dogecoin has 5x daily volume and 3x market cap is rather bewildering to me.

Honestly I would absolutely love DRK to be $100. Would be the easiest money I've ever made and prove that people want to adopt an anonymous currency and take privacy seriously. Every indicator however for the last 6 months has shown the opposite.

Right now I have absolutely zero clue where cryptocurrency is going. Bitcoin has one major advantage in that it has a fuck ton of investment going on to create mass adoption. No other coin has that.

Either way I'm still holding both

You are correct.  Unfortunately since many of these issues are not able to be identified on testnet they end up being exposed on mainnet.  That in and of itself isn't all that bad. What is an issue are the amount of updates that are released only to have to be updated shortly after.  I find it to be more of an inconvenience than anything but I'm sure that it causes many to question the overall tech.  Regardless, it isn't good for Darkcoin

I see it this way.

In 10 months, let me say that again 10 months (40 weeks) lol! Darkcoin has achieved near NSA proof privacy and practically perfected eCash.
Darkcoin is open source(open to scrutiny) and is getting better with every update.

Time will pass, dust will settle. Darkcoin will emerge.

Drk coin has some very wealthy and commited followers... Its just going through a rough spot along with basically everything else... If you believe in crypto then drk and a few others are obvious choices... This is still like the pre birth phase though.... Crypto is at best a toddler and the whole scene is just finding its feet.

congrats on your dirt cheap DRK's  

I just doubt there are enough people who actually care though.

As a small example... Right now you can chat securely online very easily (using Pidgin with the encrypted add-on) and yet the majority of people continue to use programs like Skype or Yahoo, even after it's been shown how these are monitored and logged.

So if people can make simple changes to secure their privacy and don't bother, why would they make more complex ones such as buying and using cryptocurrency?

As sad as it sounds the only people right now who are really interested in Darkcoin are either privacy nuts or drug dealers. The general public don't even know about it, let alone have an opinion formed. And for the cryptocurrency they do know about (basically just Bitcoin), they generally don't care enough to learn about it or buy it.

The Snowden revelations should have dramatically changed how people go about things. Unfortunately it has not. To me that's a clear indication of how seriously people take their privacy

Indeed, our main aim should be to have Dark overtake Litecoin as the second coin. That way it could be used by privacy nuts and so on, but also whenever anyway wants to make a truly private transaction. This is where I believe Dark will end up. I don't think it's a bad thing either, but we're not going to 100. We might get to 5 and be stable if all goes well.

Agreed. The uncertainty around BTC is having a huge effect on alts as usual. Any trader worth his salt has had to consider divesting alts with such weakness around BTC. Cash is the place to be right now for many of the traders I chat with.

Add to that the huge risks around working with exchanges, the (misplaced, IMO) hype around sidechains supplanting alts, and the not insignificant hurdles facing DRK development and adoption, and it's no wonder we're going down.

All of that said, there's huge opportunity for those with patience and resolve in markets like these. DRK has a lot going for it, and I'm betting on significant appreciation when if the BTC market finds its footing and rallies. Don't bet the farm, because that's exactly what this is... a (minimally informed) bet.

Since we are talking about gambling and betting -

if you have zero clue where it's going, then your assessment is that it's 50% - 50% whether it's going to be a success or not. If we assume the price will be $0 in case the success doesn't come, the price would only have to reach $3.44 in case it does to make your bet even money.

You can adjust the percentages according to your view and see if the "bet" is still +EV or not, for example, if you think there's 10% chance of success, the price would have to reach $17.20.