There is something I have noticed about this currency that I haven't seen talked about a whole lot, so I would like to point it out.
Bitcoin has a market cap of $8.4 billion. Darkcoin has a market cap of $43.5 million. Therefore BTC = 193 * DRK market cap.
Given this difference, it would logically follow that with equal support and stability, if a $1,000 dump could drop the darkcoin price 1%, it should take $193,000 for bitcoin to drop the same 1%.
However this isn't even close to what we see. Time and time again, thousands of DRK are dumped, and the price only moves a handful of percent. Now, I get clearly this is biased as you could point to times where this wasn't the case and DRK fell dramatically. Absolutley, but this isn't my point.
Let's use some real numbers to illustrate my point.
This is the BCW 15 miunte chart showing roughly the last 15 hours. First I want to note the high and low, 154 and 143, a 7.7% differential.
Next, notice the 3 major dumps, the first for ~5000, the next 3500, and the last 4300. 12,800 DRK dumped ~= 185 BTC ~= $120,000.
In this time period, $120,000 was dumped and the price didn't even move 8%! And saying it moved that much is incredibly generous, as the first dump dropped the price < 1%, the second ~4%, and the third 2.17%.
Now let's look at bitcoin. Using the market cap differential, one should expect 185 BTC DRK dump = (185*193) = 35,700 BTC for a BTC dump. What would happen in this case? You could buy the ENTIRE sell side of the bitstamp, bitfinex, and btce order book
COMBINED. And then some. Now I'll be reasonable, I realize in reality if one dumped that quantity of BTC, even if it was only on one exchange, a shit ton of buy support would be added. Realistically, I don't think the price would fall below $300, $200 worst case. But note, that is a 50% drop!!
And here is my real point. The amount of resilience and strength in the DRK market to handle dumps is incredible. The decrease in value darkcoin sustains from dumps on a nearly daily basis is substantially less than bitcoin has EVER felt.
Let me re-phrase. Darkcoin experiences dumps on a nearly daily basis resulting in 2-5% drops that relatively speaking would drop BTC 30-60%. It is that community resilience and support that comforts me in this investment. (Beyond the obvious tech, great dev, etc!)
Now to those wanting to tear me apart, let me just note this here, because I would like to believe I am one of the few reasonable people posting here (not that you all aren't entertaining!). Darkcoin isn't blowing bitcoin away anytime soon, or likely ever. Darkcoin will not be the final solution, or the best solution. And Darkcoin is not a sure thing. However, Darkcoin has the potential to impact cryptocurrencies more than anything else since bitcoin itself was released. It has the most resilient community of any coin I have ever seen. And it isn't going away anytime soon, unless there has been an "ultimate" privacy-centric coin that has "magical" features that has been developed in secret and is poised to be launched before Darksend is in true production.
tl;dr: I like my investment at the moment. It is going to take some major disturbances to rattle this coin and community to the point where that will change.