Well, perhaps, but unlike some altcoins, monero actually provides real utility over bitcoin. Ring signatures [1] make for better anonymity and fungibility of the currency.
Yeah sure, or sell to people that need Monero later
Monero traded at around 45 cents for the better of two years, and had trended up to around 2 dollars, still a good investment before Bloomberg, Oasis and Alphabay found out about it.
It is $8 now, with market cap of around 100 million, but bitcoin had a marketcap greater than that when Silk Road was the only marketplace in town.
Dark net markets are much much bigger than when Silk Road was around, and two of them are adopting Monero
On the one hand, yes, on the other.... If so then the market that made the announcement risks its reputation and its ability to function. But this sort of reputation leverage could be the people running the market making one last big hit of cash before leaving the game. Or it could be real.
Looks like Monero was created to solve tangible problems in the Bitcoin experiment.
Remember the phrase "Bitcoin experiment." The initial Bitcoin proposal claimed that it's an experiment, and implied that it wasn't designed to scale to general-purpose commerce.
It implied that it was an experiment, but it never implied that it wasn't suitable for general purpose commercial usage. By all reasonable metrics, the experiment was and continues to be successful.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monero_(cryptocurrency)#Privac...