Please excuse me... is the needle in the haystack you found the realization that both coins are going down?
There is a giant vacuum sucking the energy out of those coins.
Can you find it?
I left breadcrumbs everywhere.
I'll play...
I'm not going to say there isn't profit to be made in Monero because I think there is some room for more adoption in the future, but I don't think its potential is as big as the believers think it is. The general public could care less about privacy. We live in a generation where it is the norm for people to tweet/facebook/instagram/vine/etc every time they blink, and these are the same people that are going to care about anonymous financial privacy versus pseudonymous financial privacy???
It also stinks of a pump and dump, which is unfortunate considering it has good tech behind it. A lot of the Bitcointalk "old timers" seem to have bought into it relatively around the same time and use their "reputation" to constantly pump it via many threads (and useless posts in said threads) in this sub forum. Imagine the cluster-fuck the forums would be if all alternative cryptocurrency communities created and/or bumped as many threads in this sub forum as often they do.
Also, they all magically ended up endorsing the same fork of Bytecoin. There are other fairly released CryptoNote coins, some with more features and an official GUI, yet it is Monero that they have picked to be the "chosen" one because who knows why.
I have theory that some of these same people had an optimized GPU miner at Monero's launch and had a huge advantage during the first month of mining. To be fair, I share these same concerns with all coins that had optimized GPU mining clients released shortly after an initial launch where only CPU/inefficient GPU mining clients were available to the masses. Maybe I am paranoid.
There is no official GUI, because apparently the masses care more about privacy than ease of use.
Then there is the emission curve, for which newcomers to the cryptocurrency community will be harping on in the years to come. It isn't as bad as an instamine, but it effectively will look the same as an instamine to newcomers in 7 years when inflation drops to <1%.
I won't talk about why Dash is doomed because its flaws are quite obvious and it's only a matter of time until that bubble bursts.
