DRK's launch day was bad. .... Right now, day 1 stands a bit under 40% of current supply. The entire instamine is about 10% of estimated total supply.
The numbers do improve over time, but 10% is beyond the pale. It could be fixed with an airdrop or some other expedient to disperse those coins, but that leaves a lingering issue: What does that history say about the competence, the moral and strategic capability of the leading actors? The instamine distribution numbers could be fixed, but as long as those actors are still influential in the community, the technology decisions, the governance, I don't think it is a reasonable place to store value -- nor would I be inclined to trust lifestyle-threatening secrets to their quasi-cryptographic privacy schemes, let alone their implementation of those schemes, given the manifold ways in which they could subvert those obfuscations in order to conduct extortion which would be far, far more profitable than any instamine has ever been. As an investment? My observation of enterprises over the years has been that any sort of internal corruption absent rigorous and effective governance capable of detecting and correcting it, is probably going to be fatal to the enterprise as a whole.
I know this is not a DRK-bashing thread. But DRK does have more nominal cap than XMR, so it is very important to the future of XMR. XMR cap passed DRK briefly before the BCX fud fiasco. Any meaningful speculation on XMR depends in some non-negligible part on its ability to take share from DRK. thankful_for_today is no longer in the mix, so I feel the sources of potential corruption have been removed, the taint effectively washed away, from XMR. The rapid mining start was somewhat rash perhaps, but entirely open and public, and the distribution impact miniscule. This makes the investment potential much better. The tech makes the transaction potential much better, because it is darker than dark, and less likely to be sabotaged, subverted. The value store potential....well, that depends on so many other factors, and is so far out on the horizon that I won't even go there yet.