On second thought. Botnet operators may not neccisarily dump this coin. It's the PERFECT medium of exchange for that sort of person. This will be the hacker coin. Maybe by making such a memory hard hashing function, we have inadvertently put it into the hands of exactly the people to whom it is most useful.
It might be the case that Monero botnet owners are actually looking for a long term investment, but I suspect this is opposite to their general logic. If you have a botnet (owned or rented) or a large number of Amazon EC2 instances, you need to cover the costs. This is a regular business for dumpers, not the investment vehicle.
Botnet dumping issue will continue as long as botnet mining is profitable, which is a balance between the average mining reward and the exchange rate. The price simply can't go up radically if it is profitable to downsell the mined coins immediately. In my opinion, it is better to wait either until the block reward is halved (half a year or something) or difficulty drops significantly (indicator that botnet owners are leaving the coin due to low margin). Until then I expect the worst scenario for XMR when exchange rate is crashing even more as the market moves to equilibrium.
