Just a little back story about why I'm interested in Monero. Apart from a little trading last year I have never held any alternative coin and have always been of the opinion that Bitcoin has no challenge. When I say challenge I don't mean something beating bitcoin, what I mean is something coming along and offering a technical capability that bitcoin does not offer. It doesn't mean a coin rivaling Bitcoin in an economic sense.

Up until Monero I have never held another coin out of principal and now I do.

The two technologies you mention, zerocoin/cash and coinjoin, once held promise in my mind but after closer examination fell short of my expectations.

The zerocoin and zerocash technologies are plagued by uncertain novel mathematics and the initial accumulator. The first one may be solvable through decades of use without weaknesses being discovered, however the accumulator is an issue I couldn't mentally work around. I cannot trust a system where it potentially could be circumvented and there is no way to prove this isn't the case.

Coinjoin looks good but the joining mode always presented a huge problem. Gmaxwell mentioned on hackernews about a new technology called cryptonote that was both working now and far superior to coinjoin.

After looking into it I saw issues with the bytecoin implementation due to the coin release being ridiculous and looked for the best alternative. I found Monero.

The ring signature technology is better than those systems that you propose can be built on top of bitcoin.

Sometimes it feels like Bitcoin is becoming its own entrenched system of power where the Bitcoin holders desperately seek to eradicate and argue away any other technology that might take even a couple percent of its market away. Even other systems that are not clones, that bring something worthwhile to the table.

You mentioned how the ledger is Bitcoins grand feature, however Monero does not want that. I hold both Bitcoin and Monero because I see the technologies not making a convergence but rather existing together.

The only possible way I can see Bitcoin absorbing the features of Monero is through side chains.

It's a mistake to believe that the inflation rate is hurting Monero. Rather, it's distributing it cheaply as far as I am concerned. The problem with piggybacking on an existing, distributed blockchain is that there is no longer any reasonable chance of a distribution that is widespread. For instance with Bitcoin, if you launched it as a merged mining chain, you add all the insecurity of merged mining (usually a single large pool can destroy the currency) while distributing the coins mostly to large ASIC farms. This is less than ideal.

Right now large, large quantities of MRO are being mined and dumped by licit (or possibly illicit) compute clusters, which are readily dumping into the market. Speculators are buying with their own cash, and won't let go of their coins until they realize a profit. In the meantime, the supply is falling regularly and will press the market upwards. I'm not terribly worried about the recent dumps, they're redistributing wealth.

So far none of them are -- there's a serious vulnerability that was patched in MRO about a week ago but still exists in most of the forks, I'm waiting to see when they decide to handle it.

The worrying part is algorithms depending on L3 cache latency to deter gpu/asic use aren't effective, so that part should have been scrapped on day one for a real algo.  All this current algo does is make it a botnet coin during it's prime distribution period.  The smartest move would be to launch with a GPU algorithm so that you get good market penetration, which anyone knows is essential to a currency.

It gets old listening to people claiming a CPU coin has some ridiculous "one man one vote" garbage when it's the exact opposite.  CPU coins have the worst distribution and market penetration of any coin.  Dogecoin probably has the best market penetration and used GPU, so there's actual real world data on this if it wasn't already blatantly obvious.

Dogecoin has this whole "join the Dogecoin Navy" thing where people literally donate spare GPU cycles at a loss to support the network. It's incredibly altruistic and possibly the worst example you could've picked.

The algorithm is not designed to prevent GPU mining; it's designed to close the gap between GPU and CPU mining so that 30-year-old SWMs with a 4 GPU rig don't cannibalise the coin and dump to cover their electricity. Someone mining with a botnet has less inclination to dump than GPU miners.

At any rate, the PoW is literally the least interesting thing about Monero, and time will tell if the current PoW has any long-term value or not.

The only short term problem for MRO is that supply is a tad bit more than demand. Acknowledgement, recognition, and adoption are slower compared to what it should have been and the various clones derailed the initial momentum it was gathering and proved to be detrimental to each and every one of them. Fragmentation is the only reason why alt coins cannot succeed and never be allowed to succeed by factors external to an altcoin's ecosystem.

There is always going to be a first move advantage when it comes to altcoins but forking/cloning/fragmentation will make sure that growth is limited and definitely never in the scale of BTC.

I definitely feel great about mining MRO from the second it released and happy to see Taco and team at the helm. If people don't see what MRO is doing it is their loss. I am happy to add to my stash from exchanges and mining alike.

Also kudos to aminorex for introducing the forum vets to MRO. I think it was he who first dropped hints in the Wall Observer thread.

Thanks for the enlightening debate everyone and @xtester for well referenced and rational and healthy skepticism.
The bold above triggered my response action; Peter is not an evangelist, he just made what I think is an important discovery, and that is a correlation (causation?) that Metcalfe's law describes the value in the Bitcoin network.

In my view this is a breakthrough because it supersedes some of the voodoo in monetarist theory, and quantifies the value of a unit of account by the quality of the connections in an economic network.  

And if you take the Bitcoin Metcalfe's law correlation on face value, all the arguments follow to their logical conclusion. I don't believe we can predict anything, but we can act on what we know, and we know Bitcoin can't scale to accommodate the global transactions today, and we know the value in the network, spin-off's actually leverage both those opportunities.
 Side-chains by comparison, are complex risky and hinder innovation, and diversification of the Bitcoin value ledger.

Fair point and one I'm still pondering, hence my high priced example.
But on second thought, once btc is up that high, it will mean adoption is on another level.
What is probably fair to say though is what I already alluded to, we are going to have
more of a disparity in price between the different tierd layers of alts.
Will be interesting going back to these early "pizza posts"...

Only a valid point in the case of kleptocracies that don't provide basic services in exchange for the tax money.  There are countries where they pay taxes just like we do in the first world (or even more heavily in proportion) but don't even get clean water or basic road maintenance for their money, and yes, in that case I could talk about a "parasite class" and the "exploitation" of people via taxes. 

For the rest of us?  Naaah, I don't think so.  Government adminstrative overhead isn't substantially worse than the sum total of corporate administrative overhead and stockholder profit taking.  By and large, I think most of us get our money's worth.