I always thought Litecoin was going to be the #2 altcoin forever because of its "Bitcoin backup" status. Boy, those were the days of being naive.
It should be pretty obvious that the #2 coin is going to be a privacy centric coin in the future.
Monero seems poised to take that spot, as continues its slow (but steady) growth.
The problem is that general public does not care much about privacy. if privacy was something that general public actually cared, facebook would be not in a position it is today, microsoft would get much more heat for windows 10, and samsungs smart tvs would not sell so well.
One reason for this is education. Most people dont know how all the modern 'smart' technology is intrusive. Second is government propaganda that encryption and hiding something is bad and if you should be an open book if you have nothing to hide. Just as an example, today I heard that
australian tax office wants access to "metadata' of your phone, emails etc, for " the purpose of protecting public finances from serious criminal activities such as major tax fraud". You can just imagine what they would do if putting money in monero, in which it is hidden from spying, would become popular.
Wining with privacy and anonymity is basically a lost battle at this stage. But, this does not stop monero from being used and success. For monero to success, it is enough to build a community that will be using it, not only for quick pumps and dumps. It does not have to be #2, as this will attract too much attention from anti-privacy governments and agencies, and definitly from tax office. Let 95% people use bitcoins, litecoins and let monero be used by fraction of people who truly care about privacy. Similarly, like with email. Let most people use gmail, outlook, and let just fraction use privacy centric emails. tutanota or protonmail do not need to win with gmail or outlook to be successful. So continueing in this wain, it would be perfect start for monero, if privacy oriented services, like tutanota or protonmail, vpn providers, etc, started accepting monero. Because if priavecy oriented service providers will not see the importance of protecting ones privacy and anonymity in payments, no one else will.