Market Cap - $3,349,379,226
Price - $435.73
Circulating Supply - 7,686,787 DASH
https://www.dash.org/
What Is Dash?
Dash is Digital Cash. It is one of the few DAOs, decentralized autonomous organizations, that actually work. As a DAO, it's decentralized governance and budgeting system sets it apart from all of the competition. Dash is one of the handful of established coins that are staying true to the original vision of what Satoshi created, a peer-to-peer digital payment system. It was launched in January 2014 as Xcoin and rebranded shortly thereafter as Darkcoin. In early 2015 it was finally rebranded to Dash.
Rocky beginnings
In hindsight, the launch of Dash was absolutely done wrong. If the community knew then what they knew now I don't doubt that things would have been handled differently. You have to remember that this happened in a time before ICOs and pre-mining of coins. From the Dash Wiki
Within the first two days of launch, 1.9 million coins were mined, which is approximately 10% of the total supply that will ever be issued. Creator and lead developer of Dash, Evan Duffield, attributed this to a bug created when the Litecoin code was forked to create Dash, "which incorrectly converted the difficulty, then tried using a corrupt value to calculate the subsidy" Once the problem was resolved, Evan offered to relaunch the coin, but the community overwhelmingly disapproved. As such, the initial distribution was left alone and development of the project continued. The majority of mined coins were distributed on cryptocurrency exchanges in the following months at very low price levels.
The first thing I ever heard about Dash was the "instamine scandal". After researching I found that people were selling their Darkcoins by the tens of thousands at the rate of 10,000 DRK for .25 BTC. It was a quick money grab by most. The Instamine happened. I don't think it was malicious, just greedy, and many of the original participants sold out their coins for cheap.
The Team
Dash has one of the most impressive teams in crypto. Dash Core is the team in charge of developing the currency and has grown to 30 full time employees, 20 part time employees, and dozens of community volunteers. The Dash Core team is paid market rates through Dash's budget system and don't rely on donations. The Dash Core team.
Dash founder Evan Duffield has stepped away from the Dash Core team earlier this year to start Dash Labs. Dash Labs is, as Dash as whole is, dedicated to bringing cryptocurrency to the masses. It is self funded by Duffield and they are working on custom open-source hardware for long term scaling, including scaling to ultra large blocks. The all inclusive plan will create hardware and software to allow the transition from blocks sized 2MB through 400MB.
The third organization working under the Dash Network is Dash Force. Dash Force deals with community-level engagement, including media, community contests and giveaways, international outreach, main street adoption, and defensive messaging. They are active on Twitter, YouTube and Reddit, and also run their Dash focused website https://www.dashforcenews.com/ and the YouTube channel by the same name.
Innovation
In the land of a thousand coins, one of the major attributes that draws me to a coin is innovation. Whether it's Smart Bridges, Atomic Swaps, or Incubator programs, when I see a coin doing something new it piques my interest. It seems many cryptocurrencies start their own coin and take other people's work and mash it together to make something successful. But where does that leave them for the future. Will they just continue to piggy back off of other developers hard work? Dash has a big list of innovations which includes
- X11: power saving hashing algorithm
- Dark Gravity Wave: highly reliable difficulty adjustment
- Sporks: Multi-phased forking technology avoiding hard forks during network upgrades
- Masternodes: Incentivized full node infrastructure through split of mining reward
- PrivateSend: protocol level coin mixing without the flaws of CoinJoin
- InstantSend: instantly confirmed double spend proof transactions
- Treasury: Self-funding by splitting of block reward
- Blockchain Governance: Voting rights for those who provide our network's backbone
- Evolution platform technology: Under heavy development but making rapid progress towards true digital cash so user-friendly that even your grandmother could use it
And there are many great minds continuing to innovate and push toward the future.
Treasury
Hands down, for me the number one feature of Dash is the treasury. The block reward from mining is split three ways. 45% goes to the miners, 45% goes to the Masternodes, and 10% goes to the treasury. With the price rise of Dash, this give them a monthly budget of millions of dollars (currently just under $3 million). From this budget anybody can request funding for projects related to Dash. The Dash Core development team, for example, is paid from this budget. Many notable projects have been funded, some delivered, some not. Charlie Shrem got funding for a Dash debit card. Dash Aerosports put Dash branding on airplanes. Alt36 is currently working on Dash ATMs and payment systems for the cash-only cannabis industry that has started up in the United States.
https://www.dashtreasury.org/ is a fun website to look at for current and past proposals.
Community
It's hard to say anything bad about any crypto community. There are always going to be the proverbial turds in the punch bowl. But I have found that, for information, Dash has one of the better communities. Every popular forum is going to have the moon talk and HODL memes, but Dash just seems more my style. It's mostly news, updates and answered questions. All of the information you could ever want can be found on the dashpay subreddit through user content, stickied posts and side bar information. Basilpop and the other moderators have done a great job spending time providing useful, organized content.
Evolution
The project that could make Dash a household name. Fortunately for me there have been many people that convey information much better than I do that have done articles and videos. It's worth looking into and could be a game changer for what we think about paying with crypto currency. Here's a nice, short article with a couple short videos.
Conclusion
This blog post is coming right after a major Core update which cut fees by a magnitude of 10 and increased the block size to 2MB. This was done with no drama. No infighting. No turbulence. It's also coming right after a nice Korean pump (up to over $550 at one point!). All of this information was easily found through the Dashpay subreddit and the Dash website and it's forums.
I'm giving away free Dash, because I like to give stuff away. All you have to do is leave a Dash address below and I will choose a winner with randomresult.com on Monday, November 20th at 5:00 PST. I will be giving away .1 Dash to three different addresses. No terms and conditions apply
