Those few thousand darkcoins dumped so far out of the 2 million
instamined coins to get to this price is only a drop in the ocean. Those pump and dump operations can be very profitable as long as you not miss the exit train.
Darkcoins biggest problem however is that it is fundamentally flawed similarly to
Auroracoin (13.8 mBTC to 0.098 mBTC). You have to be the dumbest bloke in the block to
spend money on something, someone else produces for free. No, the free coins reference it does not include you if you bought the 1000 coins expensively to set-up a gold laying egg (masternote) only the initiator profits massively, as with every scam. No price will ever be "cheap" as the
free produced coins will keep coming. Eventually it will enter into a dead spiral because the more masternotes you have running the faster you have another one and get even more coins. 1 or 2 notes gets you nowhere in this race.
The other fundamental flaw is the fact that out of the thousand or so active coins out there no other coin is easier to take down by the authorities as every masternote operator is a sit′ting duck′. Central connection is utter failure, you take em' down one after the other.
Fundamentally flawed is also the mining reward. 500 to start with then 150 for a few months and now a whopping 5 of which the miner gets 80% and not 100% like at the start or with the 150 reward.