Bitcoin Forum

1. a centralized currency can and will be controlled by a set of people

So like 7 pool operators for instance?

Good morning all. I hope you're all enjoying your lives wherever you happen to be.

I see we received yet another visit from the detractors while I was away. I read through their posts filled with buzzwords and misdirection, which are typical ploys by people who would seek to "control" the narrative about a competing coin to serve their interests.

Everything that needs to be said by us on these matters has already been said in this thread, no need to bore you with that.

thank you .. free publicity is always nice to get thrown in your lap and as no bad publicity exists
i'm more then happy with this thread.

Carry on gentlemen, please bump it as much as possible.

Any chance on a few more of these Anti-Dash threads ? eh.. for free of course

Anything of substance to add? Or does intimating that I get paid count as a counter-argument?

Let me try again. The crux of your argument is that you contend that because of the instamine that only a few people control the voting power, correct?  Well, even if we were to ignore the markets for the last two years distributing the coins, you still haven't come up with any evidence that only a few people partook in the instamine. The problem with your argument is that it starts with a hypothesis, not fact. As I've mentioned before, Masternodes are incentivised full nodes that anyone can run, and my grandmother runs one. You could too if you had the means and were so inclined.

True story: Dash used to have a marketing contract with Transform PR. Evan Duffield was firmly in favor of this DGBB proposal, and it went through. About a month later, some Dash Nation members became disillusioned with the proposal and started lobbying to have it voted down. This resulted in the contract being voted out, despite the objections of the coin's large holders. Evan was forced to personally cancel this contract. This story is verifiable on DashTalk.org.

The system works as designed, and is a marvel of decentralized governance. It is not perfect, though, and will be fine tuned over time.

Show me two repetitive posts I made. My challenge is to set the record straight after two years of spin and innuendo, and you can't do that with a single post. This thread is a marathon, not a sprint, and the facts prevail in time.

Conveniently ignoring my reasoned reply are you?


Carry on! I'm glad the cute little puppy's inspiring you...

DASH has released a decentralized voting and fund allocation mechanism that could bypass the internal tensions of Bitcoin and its dramatic block size debate.

Who will decide?

A great deal of attention has been going to Bitcoin's blocksize debate, which includes fundamental aspects of how Core Development is funded, distributed, and by whom. While Bitcoin is going through the computer science equivalent of group therapy, DASH, the fifth largest cryptocurrency by market cap, has released a Decentralized Governance by Blockchain System while taking notes from Bitcoin's internal turmoil, in an attempt to completely bypass it.

A few of the problems with decentralized and open source projects are development planning, funding and fund management. Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen have argued that Bitcoin needs a benevolent dictator, a notion that enough people have recoiled from as evidenced by the low popularity of Bitcoin XT.

The notion nevertheless highlights the need for a swift and reliable decision making process. Consensus is great for many things, but fast decision making is not usually one of them.

The most common approach to this problem is the creation of not-for-profit foundations tasked with maintaining the core protocol and promoting the project at hand. However, as demonstrated by the controversies involving the Bitcoin Foundation, these are not connected to the users and community in any meaningful way.

For example, three of Bitcoin's core developers are now funded by the MIT's Media Lab, Digital Currency Initiative, an arm of MIT Labs, lead by White House advisor, Brian Forde. His proud connections with the executive branch are bound to set off some people's alarm bells – to put it nicely.

Granted, funding of Bitcoin Core is already decentralized, according to Jeff Garzik, who claims that it is “spread across several companies/entities.” However, this still relies on human organizations and processes that are susceptible to censorship, human error, and back room deals, which is far from ideal. But what must be noted is that this is now avoidable.

DASH: the game & the players

DASH's new Decentralized Governance by Blockchain (DGB) was clearly designed with this problem in mind. But to get an idea of how it works, let’s take a quick look at DASH's network set up, since it does have some notable differences compared to Bitcoin.

DGB could be thought of as a mathematically enforceable and fully transparent democratic process. It is a blockchain hosted voting system with decentralized fund management built in.

DASH is comprised of three types of 'nodes' - three different ways in which the DASH software clients can be used, with specific roles and responsibilities on the network.

The first are miners, who provide proof-of-work security to the cryptocurrency in a similar fashion to Bitcoin, though instead using X11, an algorithm designed and believed to be ASIC resistant. Miners provide computing power in exchange for a regular payment from the network to the tune of 45% of the block rewards.

The second are full node wallets, which host the accounting ledger (blockchain) allowing users to access the network, use the currency and further decentralize it.

And the third and most innovative element of DASH are its “Masternodes.” These are regular full nodes that anyone can run, but with the difference that they host a 1,000 DASH collateral, equivalent to roughly US$2,500 at current rates (works with cold storage). The collateral earns hosts the right to provide services to DASH users at a profit – 45% of block rewards. Services such as DarkSend — the feature that brought DASH to fame — as well as Instant Transactions, the controversial 4 second transaction locking feature.

45% Mining Reward
45% Masternode Rewards for Proof­of­service
10% Decentralized Budget System  


The 1,000 DASH collateral is intended as a security mechanism, making it prohibitively expensive to cheat the system by attempting a 51% attack. In practice securing this upper layer of applications with Proof of Stake.

There are currently over 3,000 Masternodes live, roughly half of the amount of active full nodes of the much older Bitcoin network.

Decentralized Governance by Blockchain

DGB is built on top of this network of Masternodes. It allows anyone to propose changes or upgrades to the currency. Initiatives the community deems necessary, be it legal, marketing or otherwise, can also be submitted to the network directly through the blockchain, while 10% of the block rewards go towards funding elected proposals.

Proposals are then voted on by the community on a monthly basis. Masternode hosts are the only parties with a right to vote on these. Their choices are Yea, Nay, or Abstain.

Proposals must have at-least 10% more Yea votes then Nay and must also compete with other submissions for a grand prize of roughly 8,000 DASH a month, or today's US$19,000.00 dollar equivalent.

If MN Hosts take back their collateral, i.e. disconnect from the network, their vote is disabled until they return.

Decentralized Autonomous Organization

One possible problem this system might run into might be voter apathy. What is the incentive for Masternodes to vote? It could be argued that since DASH is effectively at the mercy of other voters now, then that will be enough for them to be alert and willing to participate. However, this remains to be seen.

The cost of submitting a proposal is 5 DASH, but these units are destroyed, instead of serving as an incentive to do something else, like vote. Which is similar to how Augur's wisdom of the crowd system works.

So just how well this system will work remains to be seen. If successful, it could potentially make decisions like the block size debate much more efficient and provide a unified means of communication on the blockchain itself.

The fact that DASH is officially funded by the blockchain itself — the value of its units supported by a democratic process of investment election — may mean that DASH is a kind of evolving and adaptive, living organism. Or at the very least, a clear cut example of the mythical and up until now imaginary, Decentralized Autonomous Organization.

Also, Tok, please refrain from hiding behind media--either make a sound argument, preferably concise

Can the nodes really be bought and sold? I thought "paynodes" simply meant they got a percentage of the block reward.

Nodes are really just servers who can show to the Dash network that they have a collateral of 1000 Dash and are running Dashd properly.
The actual 1000 Dash are always in full control of its owner and are kept in a cold wallet. Once the collateral is moved
(towards an exchange for example to cash out), the verification fails and the network will no longer regnonice that server as a masternode.

As long as its operating as a masternode it can receive 45% of the block rewards (some 12% yearly) which is the same for miners.
The block rewards are scheduled to deminish over time (Dash has a yearly 7% cut in block rewards).

Can the nodes really be bought and sold? I thought "paynodes" simply meant they got a percentage of the block reward.

Your claim is that with Dash the more of the coin supply people own, the more they WILL own. (Masternodes are not "owned". I already pointed that out to you).

My response to that was that Dash was an open, not a closed system (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1433982.msg14564553#msg14564553) and that that rendered your theory about as veracious as most of your other posts which are more about opening your mouth and letting your belly rumble than economics, ethics or balanced technical appraisals.

Your sure giving your keyboard good workout though. Appreciate the attention  8)

Lets take a look at some numbers with regards to Masternode rewards :

https://dash-news.de/dashtv/?value=1000

https://i.imgur.com/DY6oSBN.jpg

As you can see the annual MN interest is currently 11.33% which is depending on both number of active masternodes and mining difficulty.

So using this helpful chart we can see that in roughly a year, that someone who controlled 2000 masternodes could accrue 200 more and increase their voting power by 20% without lifting a finger or producing a useful project. I use 2000 as this is the number that could be bought by those lucky enough to be mining the first 2 days of the coins existence (2 million coins of 18.9 million).

Re: Why Duckfeld fails decentralization

i sense a decline in the quality of posts since generalizethis went to (one or more of)[bed | movie | toilet | snuff-den | Dash g-string pump up doll rendevouz at the Dash Dalmation dog soda vending machine]+

Stop reading your own posts then, lol.  :P

Good evening everyone!

Why centralized organizations funding Bitcoin development is a train-wreck:

https://petertodd.org/2016/mit-chainanchor-bribing-miners-to-regulate-bitcoin

Dash will avoid these kind of issues with decentralized governance and funding. That's a big reason why Dash is poised to be the digital cash Satoshi envisioned, the Internet of Money.

All who value progress, optimism and decentralized technology are welcome to join us in Dash Nation.

Dash has decentralized technology (PoW mining, full nodes, masternodes, blockchain governance). There is no debate here.

The point you're laboring is that there's no way to prove this technology isn't operated/controlled by a handful of people. You claim that because DASH's distribution is unverifiable, it's fatally flawed as a 'cryptosystem'.

For this argument to have any substance, you should demonstrate how competing coins solve the relationship between node/coin distribution & centralization. Bitcoin for example has massive mining centralization and millions of coins held by Satoshi / persons unknown. All PoW coins face mining centralization issues at scale. Monero has a massive whale in Risto who could manipulate/trash the market at any time and arguably kill the coin. Monero's core team could arguably kill the coin if they wanted to. As for governance, explain how DASH's blockchain governance is inferior to other coins where decisions either don't get made (Bitcoin) or there are just a few individuals pulling the strings (Monero).

Basically, make some reasonable, specific arguments instead of just bleating on about the instamine.

Tok, If you want to use info-graphics to dumb down the debate, that's your prerogative.

What the Bitcoin, Monero and other well designed coins do is allow you to see the centralization as verifiable data, that's the difference that matters

What the Bitcoin, Monero and other well designed coins do is allow you to see the centralization as verifiable data, that's the difference that matters. As I pointed out in my second post.

Now your claim that Risto can destroy the coin by dumping, ect, are conjecture on your part, that I don't agree with, but if he could acquire coins by accruing them through nodes and having voting power through those nodes, I'd agree--in Monero and Bitcoin the governance is done by the miners and miners have a verifiable percentage of power through mining pools. Dash created a new and worse problem by their solution, so not exactly apples to apples. But if you want to argue about mining centralization, there are threads (populated by many members of the Monero and Bitcoin community) for that. This isn't a dash versus xmr or btc thread. It is a thread about dash's failure to make distribution of power a readily available data set that anyone can objectively observe and make fair and honest assessments.

so prove me wrong

I think I just did (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1443867.msg14616842#msg14616842) that ;)

Honestly, you are going to require validation of personal ID, proof of purchase

Well, actually, the great thing about Dash nodes - as with bitcoin nodes - is that they are decentralised. (Hopefully that will keep me 'on topic' as you say).

What that means is that the node can be reproduced as may times as there are machines to run it on - without recourse to a central authority. Nice !  8)

The other nice thing about them is - unlike bitcoin nodes - they are incentivised. So thats why the Dash network has enjoyed a sustained growth (http://178.254.18.153/~pub/masternode_count.png) for an uninterupted period of nearly 2 years.

The other nice thing about it is that - being an open, freely traded asset - large holdings of Dash get broken down over time whenever there's a price rise, just like every other asset in existence. You can in fact see this happening in 3 places:

- the nicks in the mastered count that co-incide with big market movements
 - volume trades on exchanges
 - chatting to them in the pub where it turns out they just offloaded 10 of their nodes the week before in a profit take

The other nice thing about it is that this economic phenomenon (market distribution of assets) happens to be independent of how people acquired them. So people that grew their holdings by investing are exposed to the same prevailing economic incentives as those that grew their holdings through mining and they are similarly exposed to the same prevailing economic incentives as those who grew their holdings through collateralising a masternode.

So, all in all, maximisation of decentralised monetary properties is therefore what Dash is all about ;)

Re. Centralisation, Personal ID, proof of purchase, trusted parties

You might be thinking of:

A. A bank
B. Obscured blockchains that require the public to depend on a layer of trusted third party technology rather than shared public consensus to establish an endorsed value (See more info here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1443867.msg14616846#msg14616846))

Hope that clears everything up !  ;D

(Mods: On topic)

Explain how mining centralization statistics are 'verifiable data'. How do you know who controls the big mining pools? How do you know if they're not all controlled by one entity/guv etc?

Your claim that DASH's governance solution is a 'worse problem' is conjecture on your part.

The salient distinction is that mining influence in Bitcoin has nothing to do with how many tokens you own. And mining expenditure is ongoing whereas staked masternodes are only deposited once.

The salient distinction is that mining influence in Bitcoin has nothing to do with how many tokens you own. And mining expenditure is ongoing whereas staked masternodes are only deposited once.

We've already explained this before. I am not going to explain again why staking is not secure.

With the bolded above, you're assuming A. that the nodes and coins aren't just being traded between the same people

Good point !

I could just be trying to fool everyone into thinking that anyone can buy Dash when it's in fact just a couple of us passing the same 6 million coins back and forward on Polo and charging more for them each time.

However, I just realised that I have personal experience of your theory needing at least a bit of polishing.

A few months ago I was saving up for another masternode. The reward share I was getting from my other node was helping with this (cos lets face it, getting paid a couple of Dash every few days for keeping a node running DOES help and DOES kind of make you want to get another one. So so far your theory's holding up).

But then something unexpected happened. PAMM ! The tenant in a small flat I rent out called me up in the middle of the night to say the ceiling had caved in due to water ingres from the roof above. Turns out I was uninsured for this catastrophe cos I hadn't told the insurer I was renting. So I did a review of which of my assets I could least afford to liquidate. It was a toss up between the '75 Fender Strat in my cupboard and the 600 Dash. Guess which one won ;)

If only your theory about centralisation had held up - and Dash holders were not in an open economic system I might have had that other node. Instead somebody else has it.  :-[

Then again, I've still got the strat. So maybe I'm not so disappointed after all  ;D

https://i.imgur.com/YjUtcih.png


By the way I hope you’re now staying away from those dodgy ‘obscured’ blockchains that tell everyone they can ‘rely on math’ when in fact they can only rely on trusted third-party implementors of math.

Bit of a scam that really, but I suppose everyone needs to get their kicks somewhere ;)

we are arguing: can you verify trustlessly that dash is decentralized.

Can you verify, trustlessly, that any coin is decentralized?

While you're at it, define 'trustlessly' and 'decentralized', since they're your favorite words (apart from instamine).

I would say decentralized means that the power structure (whether it be mining in coins like Monero or Bitcoin, or in nodes like dash) is distributed enough that one party can't determine the outcome of votes

Mining influence in DASH has nothing to do with how many tokens you own either. Miners govern the coin in exactly the same way as other PoW coins - they can fork a chain at any time.

Masternodes/DGBB create an additional governance layer, providing, right now, funds for all sorts of beneficial projects directly from the blockchain.

Nobody is saying it's perfect, finished or a replacement for mining. It is, however, a good working solution <in the present> to the governance issues and decision making malaise that stunt the growth of other coins.

It may be true, but it is still not trustless decentralization.

Power corrupts absolutely and it will be no different an outcome if the power of mining is vested in too few people's hands.

Even without Dash's instamine and later emission cut, Masternodes are trusted third parties and thus a security no-no.

Even when they wanna talk about Monero (or so they claim) in their own subreddit they end up bitching and moaning about Dash instead of trying to improve their shitty, failed product. By design or stupidity? You decide:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/4i6147/advertising_for_monero/

Decentralizationthis :

https://i.imgur.com/6ea8OLx.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/PWQeGNB.jpghttps://i.imgur.com/kxJPviE.jpg

Centralizationthis :
https://i.imgur.com/IM6jHPj.jpg


Without mentioning, that without GUI more than 90% of all XMR must be in Polo :) great decentralization example kid!
How many node Monero have ???  (from https://monerohash.com/nodes-distribution.html)
Total nodes: 176 - Last updated: 24 minutes ago (just lol : another great decentralization example kid!)

Another shit thread from Trolleros.
YOU WILL NEVER SWALLOW DASH MARKETCAP! For fuck sake NEVER! Your coin is dying because of your fucking community of morons...

Once again: Try to make something positive for what you like, and stop talking about Dash all day long.

Dash's failure at trustless decentralization is the test case that formed my understanding of why trustless decentralization is necessary for any cryptocurrency to succeed at being disruptive. Dash's failure is that it built a centralizing flaw that aggregates coins to those who run nodes and layering power functions (votes, fees, privacy, etc...) onto these nodes.

Dash's nodes have two major weaknesses in design: first, they are pay based, or paynodes, which means that they can be bought and sold. The second flaw in design is that they collect fees, which means node holders collect money that in turn can be used to buy more nodes that in turn can collect more fees, and so on and so forth. Where this especially becomes troubling is that dash's launch produced 2 million coins in 2 days and this initial distribution cannot be verified to be fairly distributed, which means the resources to buy 2000 nodes (more than half of current existing at this writing) were made available to a few lucky guys who happened to be mining at that right moment--considering this is 30% of current distribution and given that they could have bought 2000 or more masternodes since that scheme was introduced, the number of masternodes these initial miners could have may be considerably more than 30%, and considering that this control can aggregate over time, it illustrates why these systems need to be trustlessly verified.

I apologize for all the numbers just thrown at you, but lets make it simpler, since the masternode system collects the revenue that determines its degree of centralization, and that centralization can't be verified to any statistical certainty, we should assume that it is increasingly trending towards a traditional oligarchy or monarchy, where one or a few have undue power over the entire system--how it behaves, the distribution and security of its benefits.

We can assume this model fails at decentralization if we follow the principle that a cryptosystem should be trustlessly verified--it is imperative that if you want to break away from the shackles of a central power and from the enablers of these systems, you can not get there following the same old trusted rules, mathematics have given us the tools to undermine and outperform these old world systems, but we will never get there by using systems that forgo the technology and embrace the old world trust model in a vain attempt to disrupt those standards by embracing them.

You don't get my point :

Another shit thread from Trolleros.
YOU WILL NEVER SWALLOW DASH MARKETCAP! For fuck sake NEVER! Your coin is dying because of your fucking community of morons...

Once again: Try to make something positive for what you like, and stop talking about Dash all day long.



And for your title it should say : "Why I think Dash fails decentralization".
Objectivity kid, Objectivity.

You don't get my point :

Another shit thread from Trolleros.
YOU WILL NEVER SWALLOW DASH MARKETCAP! For fuck sake NEVER! Your coin is dying because of your fucking community of morons...

Once again: Try to make something positive for what you like, and stop talking about Dash all day long.



And for your title it should say : "Why I think Dash fails decentralization".
Objectivity kid, Objectivity.

Hate me for this but this is where shadowcash steps in...

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but one of the Monero Devs deanonymized shadowcash already.

https://shnoe.wordpress.com/2016/02/11/de-anonymizing-shadowcash-and-oz-coin/

Although, if we are talking just about decentralization, shadowcash is probably more decentralized than dash--it would be hard not to be unless we're comparing it to Ripple.

Thisnis old news dude... The fix was fixed...