We are in a competition right now with hundreds of other cryptos to try and convince the masses to settle on "our" coin, out of all their other options. Were determining who is going to survive long enough to have a chance to be taken up on a major scale. And for that to be us, the masses will require some shinies.
Bitcoin got to 10bn marketcap with no bling bling though
I think if you do well what you ought to do, then recognition and adoption is inevitable. If you hype yourself beyond what you can deliver (that's what all altcoins do) the situation can only crash due to disillusionment. Darkcoins survival, for me at least, is not dependent on whether doge goes to the moon or vert tries to chew the ltc market. Do they have anything to offer? I mean
for real? I say no. We'll see in time if I'm right or not.
I also believe our "survival" is guaranteed through the anonymity characteristics because it's an enormous market cap right there - but it'll have to be constantly patched for issues and developed further (IP obfuscation should be next after DarkSend - otherwise coins with DarkSend + IP obfuscation will overtake Darkcoin as a more complete package).
On a totally different note, I was thinking that a nice incentive for marketing is giving something to people - not asking them to put their money like we are some kind of ponzi that expects them to buy our coins that we would be "unloading" to them. For example, "want money? Mine darkcoins". Make people earn it and thus appreciate them for how hard they are to get. It also helps to acquaint them with the whole cryptocurrency landscape or even one user saying to another "you know what, I'm making money with my pc", the other will be "how??", "through mining"... "and is it easy?"... "yeah peace of cake, install that, click that and you are making money, wooohooo". Right now it's more like: "no it's not easy, you must be an expert to do it, so don't even bother..."
Mining sounds ok for most of us who know what mining is and how it's done, but for noobs
mining = hell. I've had trouble introducing mining even to people with technical background and I was encountering difficulties in the start myself. This HAS to change and we can change it.
Bitcoin lost it with the solo mining thing. Pools took over, solo mining is dead (no chance in hell you'll find a block solo-ing with most altcoins let alone bitcoin), the wallet miner is inefficient, so... everything went south. But
cryptocurrencies in general lost it with specialized miners and centralized pools and stuff. Mining should be easy. Load the client and let it run - so that all users can help to secure the network.
I think one of the more mainstream features that we can add at some point is to merge the cpu miners (or their optimized code) with the qt-wallet and automate the process of mining
through p2pools. Cpu code is generally ok, not so much complexity as the opencl gpu stuff with drivers, crashes, settings etc. Thus one can start getting darkcoins with their cpu right away, via p2pools, also helping to decentralize the network. There'll be a list of 5-10 p2pools already in the client and the client will automatically opt for what is closest to the user, parsing a newly generated user address (labeled "darkcoin mining income" or something) so that the generated money can flow to it.
Darkcoin is still cpu-friendly and it can give something like 15 coins per month (0.023 BTC) / for a pc with a good cpu running 24/7.... I think resurrecting one of Bitcoin's primary attributes (cpu mining through the client but not solo) and making it easier / almost automated with a single click and more accessible to people can be a good way to introduce people to any coin.
and tried to sync from start. I'll try to find it 
