Charles Hoskinson recently visited the Public DASH Slack group to learn more about how DASH is governed. Many different community members contributed in providing answers to questions Charles asked. Below is a transcript of the questions & answers.
charleshoskinson: joined #dash_chat
charleshoskinson: Hi everybody
charleshoskinson: I'd love to get to know more about how Dash is governed
macrochip: We're your 24/7 live help desk. Any questions you can shoot at us without hesitation
macrochip: Side note: This place has been officially funded by the blockchain via budget proposal for 3 months. This is month 1 and us admins and mods are now employees of the Dash blockchain.
inthewoods: 
charleshoskinson: Let's get something scheduled and go through the entire stack. We are looking at different governance systems for ETC and many people have praised Dash.So I'd like to gain a deeper understanding of how you guys and gals do things.
inthewoods: A % of the block reward goes towards funding budget proposals. Masternode owners get to vote on which proposal gets funded. That's the essence of it in short.
macrochip: 10% of the block reward is not created until a certain block height is reached. This occurs monthly. The resulting superblock (currently 7,449 Dash) is then distributed to all proposals that the Masternode electorate chose to fund via voting.
charleshoskinson: how are the masternode members selected?
dash_advocate: Anyone who owns 1,000 Dash can own a master node.
macrochip: Anyone can become one after proving ownership of at least 1,000 Dash
charleshoskinson: Does it have to be bonded for some period of time?
macrochip: No the funds are never locked. You can move them any time:
charleshoskinson: ok, so how many masternodes are there at the moment?
dash_advocate: Approx 4,100.
macrochip: this many:
charleshoskinson: What size of quorum is required for a proposal to be accepted and also what incentives do masternodes have to participate?
macrochip: To be funded your proposal must have 10% more Yes than No votes
lebubar: (Number vote yes - number vote no) > 10% of Number total of MN
oaxaca: The incentive is a healthy ecosystem.
macrochip: The incentive to vote is indirect atm: Seeing Dash and your investment grow. But we have suggestions on how to improve that.
charleshoskinson: ok, so where did the 1000 dash come from? Is this from a calculated source or just hardcoded?
macrochip: hardcoded by Evan Duffield as an arbitrary limit. It will become subject to change once Dash hits certain price levels.
inthewoods: 45% goes to miners 45% to masternode owners and 10% is reserved for budget proposals.
oaxaca: Each masternode checks for an unspent output of 1000 Dash.
charleshoskinson: alright so there are currently 4,100 masternodes. each requires about 1k in dash to participate. at 12 dollars a dash that around 49 million in value as masternodes.
charleshoskinson: any statistics for the masternodes in terms of participation, IP addresses, etc
macrochip: yes: https://www.dashninja.pl/, also: http://dashvotetracker.com/.
inthewoods:
charleshoskinson: but the funds aren't locked?
oaxaca: The 1000 Dash can be spent at any time, which will result in the masternode dropping off the list
charleshoskinson: Ok so lets analyze a potential event
macrochip: Masternode operators have an incentive to keep their funds "locked" artificially as they are getting paid for the service their nodes provide to the network. Moving the funds stops the node from working.
charleshoskinson: what's to stop a whale from creating a large set of masternodes and then voting all the funds to his personal projects?
macrochip: The crash of value in Dash. People would see it as an attack. He'd be burning his own money.
inthewoods:
charleshoskinson: The same argument for PoS, ah ok. So MNs get fees? Each block is split 45/45/10? With 45 gets distributed to masternodes
macrochip: Precisely 45%.
charleshoskinson: An even split or proportional to the value behind the node?
macrochip: The split is even. Currently it yields 1.95 Dash every 7 days per Masternode.
oaxaca: a masternode earns the block reward for each block. Each masternode will get "paid" once out of 4,100 blocks.
charleshoskinson: So you have an incentive to create the smallest possible masternode in order to maximize your reward
oaxaca: charles - no. Each masternode has to have 1000 Dash as collateral. No smaller units.
charleshoskinson: Ok so you can't create a masternode of 1001 dash for example they are always 1000 units?
oaxaca: I guess you could use an outyput of 1001 or even 2000, but it is still 1 node.
macrochip: Technically it works like this: you have to prove you have an unspent output of exactly 1,000 Dash to send the "start masternode" command.
charleshoskinson: right so I'm saying the incentive is to always have a 1000 dash masternode.
charleshoskinson: ok, I get the scheme. How are spending proposals pushed?
oaxaca: you can submit a cli call to the network informing it of your proposal.
charleshoskinson: is there a standard format for it?
oaxaca: it costs 5 Dash to submit.
charleshoskinson: Which prevents DDosing.
macrochip: Which will be reduced to 0.1. Yes spam protection. People usually check dashwhale.org or the forums for new proposals.
charleshoskinson: Dash is a PoW based system? I recall darkcoin had some form of anonymity scheme as well
macrochip: PoW/PoService hybrid.
inthewoods: https://www.dashninja.pl/budgets.html you can see here a list of budget proposals going back one year.
oaxaca: https://dashpay.atlassian.net/wiki/display/DOC/PrivateSend This is the anon method.
macrochip: Yeah the latest form is named "PrivateSend" formerly DarkSend. A heavily modified implementation of CoinJoin which mixes funds before time to avoid timing attacks over several rounds.
macrochip: oaxaca linked you all the details.
charleshoskinson: Pretty cool so who controls dev funds?
macrochip: Every Masternode owner with a vote. Decentralized control
charleshoskinson: that's the 10 percent slice?
macrochip: If the dev team went rogue, we'd vote the out of funding
charleshoskinson: Right, What's the github repo? I'd love to see the code.
macrochip: this is their proposal for salary: https://www.dashwhale.org/p/core-team - https://github.com/dashpay/dash - the 10% slice is all the funding that is available. Dev team takes a little bite off it and leaves the rest for other proposals.
charleshoskinson: So it started as a bitcoin fork and then things diverged
macrochip: Yep. Evan made suggestions on how to improve Bitcoin but he was ignored. So he made his own fork.
charleshoskinson: We are primarily a haskell shop https://github.com/input-output-hk/rscoin-haskell for example C++ isn't a nice language to use for distributed systems programming with high assurance needs But hey, that's why I don't develop for bitcoin. Well it seems like you've created a pretty cool movement here
macrochip: I'm not fluent with the technical details but Evan mentioned he uses Python and is currently looking for NodeJS developers. C++ is still the main language though
charleshoskinson: Xena, warrior princess I liked her better in Spartacus
oaxaca: Charles, aside from the governance and privatesend, the REAL killer component is https://dashpay.atlassian.net/wiki/display/DOC/InstantSend which securely confirms a transaction in 1 second.
charleshoskinson: have you guys considered a delegation scheme for voting?
charleshoskinson: Similar to liquid feedback.
macrochip: What we've been considering is lowering the entry barrier through shared Masternodes and more granular voting. [You[ can type "
inthewoods: now you are the proud owner of 1 Dash, Charles. Guess we can tell everyone you own some Dash.
charleshoskinson: I guess I have to download the wallet.
macrochip: which one Jaxx, Exodus or Original Dash-Qt?
inthewoods: There are several to choose from. Jaxx should release their dash wallet update shortly.
charleshoskinson: what's a nice spv wallet
macrochip: electrum dash
macrochip: But our blockchain is tiny anyway so a full wallet wouldn't be too cumbersome. Thanks to 4100 dedicated Masternodes plus ordinary full nodes our network syncs faster than any other on the planet.
inthewoods: There's electrum, yeah but that one's missing the mixing and budget voting features I think. The Dash QT wallet only downloads 2GB so it works ok for now.
charleshoskinson: Has anyone examined the protocol academically? For example any whitepapers published on Dash's model or security guarantees?
macrochip: Kristov Atlas did a peer review. http://cdn.anonymousbitcoinbook.com/darkcoin/darksend-paper/Atlas_Darksend-Analysis-v001.pdf - Reply by Evan: https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/reply-to-kristovs-paper.2325/
charleshoskinson: well thanks everyone for being so friendly. I really appreciate it. And if anyone else wants to send some dash my way, I'd be happy to receive it.
oaxaca: Come back anytime.
lebubar: Like 999 more to have 1000?
charleshoskinson: haha
oaxaca: dashbot says I'm a little short...
charleshoskinson: 
charleshoskinson: I support I'll have to submit a proposal to do something. What's the clearing time on those? monthly?
macrochip: yep it's monthly till each superblock quote from dashvotetracker.com. The total number of Masternodes is 4117. Next budget payments will occur in 21 days. They will provide 2,214 DASH of 7,449 DASH total available budget. So there's still room for proposals worth over 5000 Dash
lebubar: Next payment in ~21 days.
Thanks you Charles for the interest in DASH Governance and joining our slack. If anybody is interested in joining us go ahead and visit http://www.dashchat.co we would love to have you. Good job to those of you who answered Charles questions you did a wonderful job.