First, congrats eltito! Also, thank you for the great PR job. I'm very encouraged to have an official voice posting here. It's also good to know that Evan and the others now have more time to code since they have you to take the community relations load off their shoulders.
I have a few comments, most of them simply reiterate what tantestefana, el presidente, and AlexGR have been saying all along, but here goes:
When the price of an asset changes, I start doing research to find out why. Have any of the fundamentals changed? If not, then there is no reason to reevaluate my investment. Despite the recent dumps, DRK has the some fundamentals and same potential as it has had for the last month that I've been following it.
a) First mover advantage in the anonymity field. How many innovations have there been in crypto since 2009? And yet BTC is still the granddaddy of everything. First mover/network effect is a really, really big deal. Even if other coins develop superior technology, DRK is likely to have a significant lead simply for this one reason only.
b) A functional anonymity solution with secret, yet apparently amazing, new privacy features coming in RC4. Guys, let's face it, nobody is likely to outwit the NSA/FBI when it comes to anonymous solutions. Barring some outrageous development, government organizations with many billions in funding will likely still be able to connect the dots. The point isn't to hide transactions from the government per se, it's to obfuscate them well enough so that other people can't see your "checkbook."
c) Competing anonymity solutions don't have any compelling advantages. There are a few interesting things, granted, like using I2P and stealth addresses, but most of them have fatal flaws, or at least significant weaknesses.
d) Darkcoin has developed the first real proof of service model with its masternode system. This can be used to backstop "thin" clients, to partially solve the problem of blockchain storage, and likely to add additional features which people haven't even considered yet.
e) Darkcoin has developed the spork system of introducing protocol changes, which when perfected could be a very powerful innovation.
f) Darkcoin has an incredibly talented dev team that I have great confidence in.
g) Masternodes are getting paid. It may not be by 100% of pools as we would like, but at least it's happening. People act as if they'd rather not be getting paid at all! Myself, I'd rather get paid half the time than not get paid at all. But YMMV. In a few weeks, with RC4, it will be a non-issue.
h) Media attention. Anonymity is the next big thing in crypto, and this will be getting a lot of media attention I believe. I also think that with LTC's inevitable decline and DRK's future growth, once we cross that line and become the #2 crypto, media attention is going to EXPLODE. Remember, John Q. Public is slow to figure things out, and even media sometimes misses the early developments. Guarantee when some people start looking at market cap charts and see DRK cross the #2 line, that's going to bring a lot of attention...
The bottom line, for me, is that the fundamentals are unchanged, and so my original investment decision is also unchanged. Again, YMMV.
+1
Nice Post. Agree.