There is nothing mutually exclusive for people to both make money and coin adoption to take place. It's not binary 0 or 1.
There is a reason why "dark has been a good payer". It's called fundamentals.
There are two ways to make money here (excluding scams).
You can either trade the waves of low and high as a daytrader, or you can invest in the long-term.
Now if you are a daytrader, you treat everything like P&D... If you are a hammer, you treat everything as a nail.
But DRK came to fill a vacuum on privacy and fungibility -
needs that do have a market. 13-14 months ago I foretold that the anonymous market will get at least 1% of the transparent coins marketcap, which back then was close to 8bn USD while DRK+ANC (the only two anon coins) were something like 2-3mn combined.
By May 2014 it had already occured (market cap for anonymous coins exceeding 1%), and we are still hitting the >1% of BTC's marketcap right now for anonymous coins (DRK+others).
When a market (anonymity / privacy) goes from zero % of the pie to even 1% of the pie, it has explosive growth potential (long-term). That's why 365 days ago DRK was 0.001 and now it's 0.017. Is it being adopted? Yes it is. It is #2 after BTC in some cryptocurrency betting sites and precious metal dealers. Can it go beyond that? Well... do bears shit in the woods?
Check this out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPAPThis is the Greek, ex-state owned (now privatized) monopoly on gambling.
The important stuff:
Revenue
€6.140 billionOperating income
€1.122 billionProfit
€1.021 billion So just one gambling monopoly, of a small bankrupt country like Greece (10mn people), and it does in revenue twice the marketcap of ...BTC (!).
In order to ensure that money flows to this monopoly, the state is even banning IPs and DNSes of foreign sites, while also imposing severe financial penalties on players who play abroad. Penalties are also enforced against web pages for displaying promotional banners of foreign gambling companies.
Players are also choked at the bank (when they will have to get their money back, after winning on a foreign gambling company). So money transmission of winnings is highly problematic when the bank must report to the state and the state has to fine you, say, 5000 euros.
Can you fathom what it means for cryptocurrencies when people start breaking free of these artificial restrictions? Crypto is the only available medium to do that right now. And gambling is just an example - it's just one market. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand the adoption potential and market cap implications.
As coins101 once said, I dont usually quote posts, but when I do, it's AlexGR posts. If you are lurkning here, anything you need to know in terms of potential of DASH is right here in this post. Cheers!