When dogecoin started it was treated as a joke and the biggest shit coin there was, but about three years later it's still in the top 20. Namecoin's at 45 in market cap, and primecoin's at 81 in market cap, Namecoin claimed it would change the world's domain name system, and primecoin claimed it would do important prime number stuff. Ironically the joke dogecoin shit coin was a better long term investment.
Namecoin and primecoin *were* good ideas. But the sad truth is that they would only rise above a joke like dogecoin if crypto were actually USED. It almost isn't. Crypto is an "investers" (gamblers) business mainly, and is not something that is actually used much. The actual use market cap of crypto is a tiny fraction of the market cap made by demand for "investing".
By use, I mean: use as currency (to buy stuff with and to sell stuff with) ; use as a genuine smart contract (to make deals with, other than deals about crypto itself) ; use as a store of value in the long term (without hoping for price rise) ; and indeed, block chain use of immutable ledgers, like name systems, and using PoW to do sensible work instead of heating up ASICS with mindless hash calculations. Anon coins the same. They are very important to privacy *if you do a lot of real transactions with them*. But anon coins are useless if they are just, like the rest of crypto, mainly betting tokens on exchanges.
You could compare it to, say, cars. If cars are actually used to travel, then the market will select those car producers that make good working, comfortable cars at decent prices. But if cars are only used to speculate on, and to show off in one's garage, without ever having to drive somewhere, then shitty cars can take over the market from good running cars, if they have a better buzz behind them. People putting a lot of work in good working engines will then never be rewarded as compared to people hyping nice looking, but totally bogus cars with engines that overheat if they go over 50 km/h, because almost nobody is actually driving them.
Crypto is essentially a car market where people speculate on cars, and very rarely use them to drive somewhere. They still take the bus or the train for that. But they speculate a lot about how they potentially COULD drive cars.
