Darkcoin or Monero? Where should I invest?
I think that InstantX is moving Darkcoin into a category of its own, you cant see it as an "anon" coin anymore, because just with InstantX Darkcoin would be a real contender on the crypto world, that is a huge feature with great potential. Add to that Darksend and I would invest more into Darkcoin. Having said that, I dont think the two are mutually exclusive, I do think that any cryptonote project like Monero is a way longer term project because of the untested codebase. Below you find my take on Darkcoin vs Cryptonote coins (e.g. Monero), from a previous discussion.
I do have respect for the cryptonote projects, I hope they do well, that is good for the crypto community at large. I do think that adoption for them will come slower and are thus longer term projects, longer than DRK at least, because you dont only have to deal with the maturity of the added functionality to the original bitcoin protocol but with the stability of the CN protocol itself, they have had some real scares in that front. So for large and mature crypto businesses to adopt Cryptonote a long time of stable performance, third party reviews, etc, will be needed.
Having said that, the way we compete with Cryptonote coins is not by going into a pissing contest about anon, but by adding other features that differentiate us from them. Namely:
1. Darkcoin currently has a better financial model. The current Cryptonote coins are highly inflationary the emission rate is too fast, I believe this is inherited from the original coin when it was launched, this is a problem from an investment perspective specially since they are working with a new protocol and thus will need time for the market to slowly adopt, inflation is one of the main threats they have to deal with. Darkcoin, on the other hand, took care of this early on and has a small block reward that is reduced by 7% each year, and distributes that block reward between masternodes and miners creating a better balance and less incentive to dump.
2. They have some additional things to work on like GUI wallets, and I also believe one of their main GPU miners was developed by a gifted person that still takes a percentage of all coins mined, this is something they have to deal with in time too. I am sure they will develop all of this, but again it will take time, time that we will use to make sure Darkcoin finds a place in the market in terms of adoption that ensures its long term survival.
2. We are working on other features, namely instant transactions, this is compatible with the Darksend architecture but not with the Cryptonote coins, this I believe is key, as it will differentiate Darkcoin from other anon solutions by adding value in a different area that they don't currently support. This actually will make Darkcoin competitive with any coin, anon or not.
3. Ease of integration to existing services we use the exact same Bitcoin API, rpc calls, etc. This is key to get current Bitcoin businesses to add Darkcoin, as they dont need to make a big effort to support the coin. I think the cryptonote coins will have to rely more on new businesses that are created from inception to support their coins, like they have done with their online game, but that takes longer.
Because of the above, I strongly believe the cryptonote coins and Darkcoin can perfectly coexist as we would be leader on the Bitcoin protocol and they can work on developing the Cryptonote ecosystem. So cryptonote and Darkcoin in my opinion are not direct competitors, specially as Darkcoin is already adding other features that will support it above and beyond privacy.