Any protocol that issues so many of its coins at zero cost instead of exposing them to competitive bidding is bound to tank not only the price but also:

 • adoption
 • ranking
 • transaction count
 • masternode count

...and just about every other "store of value" metric.

But yes, there will always be "believers".



For those who find it difficult to get their heads around this concept, think of it this way. If you were designing a new coin for maximum marketcap would you:

A. subject its issuance to competitive bidding ?

B. give it away to be dumped on markets for a profit at any price ?

Dash is doing B, so don't be surprised if we lose another 30 ranking places over the next year and disappear off page 1 altogether.

Climate change due to Co2 is actually complete B.S. You could fill the entire atmosphere with Co2 and it would barely make one jot of difference to the climate (since the sun would have to shine brighter for that).

I'm sure Musk knows this but "climate" is a football that's available for anyone kick. Whoever the "kicker" is, the only thing you can be sure of is, the last thing they're concerned about is...the climate.

The people who understand thermodynamics and heat transfer most thoroughly are not in fact geologists, green activists, entrepreneurs or politicians but engineers such as gas turbine designers and aero-engine control systems modellers. One of them got so sick of the climate B.S. narrative that in his retirement he actually sat down and spelled out for people how the climate works from first principles thermodynamics.

Here you go (download linked PDF):

See in particular Page 14: https://gvigurs.wordpress.com/2019/04/28/the-emperors-new-climate/

See also: https://gvigurs.wordpress.com/2019/07/10/on-duff-science/

and: https://gvigurs.wordpress.com/2020/02/27/irrefutable-settled-irrelevance/

Friday night. Too much partying.


...I think that theory has been well and truly trounced by now. What matters is not "sell pressure" in any particular market but NET sell pressure and as has been demonstrated amply, miners are not NET sellers. Masternodes are.

( A NET seller is an entity who sells without having to buy first or otherwise competitively acquire their coin stock. So they contribute only sell pressure and no compensating buy pressure).

Deleted.

I am targeting a 20% MN/Mining reward ratio as always which will propel us in a more sustainable manner to new heights and mitigate the hangover when it comes.

growth is growth and pumps are pumps
there's gain in both but the other dumps
tok's debarred for posting grumps
but who'll be here when the party slumps ?

Tide's coming in.

It's not as simple as just comparing percentage staking rewards between coins because:

1. ROI isn't calculated that way, it's calculated on the dollar value percentage gain, not the staking reward ratio

2. It includes the capital gain or loss on the collateral which your comparison doesn't account for

3. Point 2 is dependent on the speculative confidence in growth of the marketcap of the chain

With regard to point 3, Ethereum's monetary value basis is to a large extent the absorption of new supply by on-chain services and applications (we saw that with, for example, the insane valuations it reached during the CryptoKitties craze). With Dash it's scarcity value which is supported by mining, same as bitcoin, litecoin XMR, Dogue et al. Consequently with Ethereum, its value basis is growing (due to growth in on-chain apps), with Dash it's diminishing relatively (due to progressive mining deficit as a consequence of protocol changes).

So, since stakers are so exposed to capital gain/losses on their collateral, this blows away any small differences in staking reward percentages as to make them irrelevant. This is why setting the reward ratio at the right level for maximum capital gain is far more critical than setting it for maximum staking income.

P.S. I've just stumbled across the first piece of inspirational commentary I've seen from the Dash community in a long time. This here is exactly what's needed. The whole problem is that Dash is increasingly being run like a corporation - both in economic and governance terms. Economically, mining was seen as an "overhead" which it would be if we modelled Dash production like a product, but from a monetary crypto perspective is simply ludicrous. From a governance perspective it has turned the voting community into a herd mentality zone which delegates all its thinking to "the Dash government" instead of issuing them instructions. I could go on but the jist of this post is why we're being trounced by the likes of LTC, XMR, BCH, ECT...they are able to attract talent on a granular basis without relying on a single contractor for everything.

I think you just want everyone to stfu while the "tide" is allowed to do its job. That was 2014 and 2017 pump & dump mentality and some of us have already got that t-shirt.

The market is more developed now and something more more fundamental is needed to justify valuations - like reasoned argument that's bullet proof, unlike the one that was used to justify turning half the Dash supply into a free gift which was about as bullet proof swiss cheese.

Be my guest

You don't seem to understand how this coin works. Dash Core Group take their instructions from the investor community, not the other way around.

It's therefore incumbent on the investor community to do due diligence on an ongoing basis and review decisions that have been made to make sure they are having the desired effect (such as improving store-of-value competitiveness, increasing masternode uptake, boosting monetary velocity with respect to our fully-mined counterparts etc).

If they are not (which is now the case) then it's further incumbent on us to account for the failure of that action to have any impact, starting with the most glaringly obvious one - our huge mining deficit. Mining locks capital into the chain by raising the price of extracting a coin.

So far, the only other contributions have been along the lines of "it's not our turn to be washed up by the tide" which is frankly absurd given the amount of effort that goes into feature development, establishment of a governance system, payments segment targeting and general "talk" of having a competitive edge over 100% mined contemporaries.

Try having the courage to address the elephant in the room and all other results will follow.

"Some of us" do and "some of us" are not even here anymore because the performance of this coin's investability has been so hampered by its corrosive masternode givaways that they sought out competitors without such a wasteful budget payload and where more of their investment was returned in capital gain.

Recycling old evasive nonsense that relies on anecdotal accounts to create strawman arguments doesn't change that. All you need to know is there are three bases for the valuation of a crypto:

 • scarcity value
 • on-chain sinks
 • monetary velocity

The first of these is measured in the amount of financial effort required to extract a coin from the chain = (sale price - margin over acquisition cost). The second is the domain of de-fi in which Dash is not a player and the third is a race in which Dash has been left in the dust by competitors which are fully mined. Speculative values follow accordingly.

If you want to "clean up" the thread and improve the quality of debate then try posting something of substance that may address those points rather than grumbling, whining and recycling fossilised content

Lets see, at $1k, MN income is $6500 per month with zero costs. At 4570 nodes that's $30 million being effectively dumped by the blockchain as a monthly free gift with no counterbalancing investment in the chain scarcity to protect people's capital (as happens with mining).

The selling pressure is therefore enormous even without the third of it or whatever that needs to be constantly dumped for taxation. Think to yourself if bitcoin reduced the mining difficulty to zero for half its miners. What would happen to the price ? Because that's all a masternode is - a zero difficulty miner. A facility for extracting coin from the chain at zero cost.

So while 1k may be achievable in a pump, is it sustainable ? No because the asymmetry in profitability quickly crushes any revaluation back to a sustainable level. The sector with greatest selling propensity is the one at greatest gain which drags the rest down (as with daytrading market consolidations).

Who has most to lose from that ? MN investors themselves because they have so much collateral at stake that the capital loss blows their reward away to kingdom come. So why not set it at a more sustainable level and allow mining to stabilise the price and support sustainable growth ?

That is the question.

I wonder if quoting all your own posts is a good idea when making such a remark.

The wall you might more productively concern yourself with is this one at 5000 nodes since one of the objectives of the reward ratio shift was to draw more supply out of circulation to absorb our high early emission. Instead it seems to be having the reverse effect and putting the masternodes themselves into circulation.

Just another one for the list where the the protocol change is having the opposite impact to that intended  

Maybe I will be proved wrong and we'll get a sudden pump in nodecount. Or maybe the core problem is weak capital gain performance relative to fully mined competitors (FMC's) who subject their supply to competition leading to higher scarcity value. (That combined with Dash's increasingly fragmented and distributed coin supply  - a good thing in itself - lowering the nodecount ceiling).

Remember that the value placed on scarcity (the basis for mined, non-defi investment) isn't simply limited number. It's the effort required to acquire a coin from the primary supply. That effort is in inverse proportion to the profit made between acquisition and sale. So if you make 100% profit = the scarcity value was zero.

Do your own math

If I'm wrong about the nodecount trajectory and it starts to go back up then what will happen is the price will skyrocket WHILE the nodecount is increasing to the new equilibrium level. It's what happens when it hits that equilibrium level that's concerning because then the economics reverse and you get this massive profitability disparity between mining and masternode activity leading to the 2-year long crash in ranking against our contemporary FMCs.



How is monetary velocity doing ?

ZIP. FMCs are out of sight even on that count. Even the turtle-paced XMR is about to overtake us. Why ? Because store of value performance has far more impact on blockchain usage than "wallet ease of use" does. In turn, mining stabilises store-of-value performance while giving away coins pre-loaded with a 100% profit margin creates about as much stability as a gold vault with an open day.

Do you just make this stuff up as you go along to fill space ? I sometimes think you do.

We already spend nearly half the entire supply just on nodes that cost about $20 a month to run. The balance gets dumped straight into the pockets of the masternode owner. Despite that, "premium investment" has preferentially gone to fully mined competitors that pay ZIP dividend for running a node. Zero reward. Nada. You know why that is ? Because once again you've left out half the equation as you always do - in this case capital gain. The effective reward in terms of investment growth is (capital gain on collateral + weekly reward share).

Therefore the (effective) masternode reward is not whatever the Dash protocol says it is, it's what the market says it is and depends on the value of Dash. This is what's ridiculous about all your arguments - you could have an 80% MN reward that translates to $100 a week or a 20% reward that translates to $1000 per week and if increasing the masternode reward ratio to the point where we LOSE value compared to a 100% mined competitor then no amount of "moving the needle" is going to do zip for marketcap (investment) growth.

IMO where we should be right now is at least in the 10-15 ranking with a valuation based around $800 Dash to move into the next growth phase. Masternode reward share would have to be around 20% to sustain that but the DOLLAR value of that reward AND marketcap would be far healthier than it is now or has been for the last 3-4 years. That would represent a robust store-of-value platform to attract attention and USE to Dash's useability features which are almost meaningless without a strong and competitive store-of-value performance. Not this cyclical pump followed by slow-bleed chronic dump that we've had ever since 2017.

Yes, that is swell against the background of trends the last couple of yrs.

But I don't want another hangover like the last one after this pump, plesae God.

I am currently in pre-emptive hangover mitigation mode.

  Well I sure hope no potential Dash speculators are listening to this convo if this reflects the prevailing view that informs our monetary priorities.

Last I checked there were only 2 ways to acquire a mined cryptocurrency:

 • mine it
 • purchase it from someone who already did

Either way you incur a cost in order to make the acquisition - otherwise termed "buying" in economic terms. Not only that, the act of "buying" in the primary market (i.e. straight from the emission supply) works in exactly the same way commercially as it does on an exchange: pushes up the price.

The medium of exchange is different. The economic act is the same and the economic analysis is the same. If there is a lot of competition for the mined supply it pushes up the price of that supply. You therefore cannot exclude that transaction and its associated cost from the capital flow equation with respect to miners. (Unless you're trying to b.s. your audience)

It is the cost of acquisition.

============================
Additional thought.

Ok, maybe I'm taking a slight liberty with terminology by calling it "buying" since, say, gold mining would not generally be referred to as "buying" from the earth. The relevant point is that in crypto, the blockchain mined emission represents a market in the sense that the more demand there is for the supply, the more financial capital is required to acquire it. The price is set through bidding for the supply and that bidding is mediated by hashrate.

That's the key point why mining cannot be ditched by an asset like Dash. It can't "store" capital otherwise (since scarcity can't be implemented by limited numbers alone. It's the cost of acquisition that makes it worth something). The only other two stores of value are not available to us: on-chain token consumption and monetary velocity. The latter would have to be hundreds of times what it is at the moment to sustain a significant store of value.

So we are left with mining.

So you're trying to assert a theory whereby giving the coin away at zero difficulty makes for a better store of value than the original satoshi model where buyers have to compete for it ? Because then the first recipients "don't have costs and don't have to sell to cover those costs"  

I knew that crypto-tribalism and "love of one's holdings" could lead to some psychotic perspectives but I've seen it all now.

Let us examine what you're saying here in a little more detail:

"SELLERS" vs "NET SELLERS"

First, we are trying to get this coin out there. So the fact that it changes hands is a good thing, not a bad thing. We want circulation and blockchain volume. Who buys and who sells is irrelevant, what matters is the NET capital flowing into the ecosystem and whether the Dash economy benefits from those transactions or some other economy does. So with that in mind lets look at the COMPLETE capital flow for each of the recipients in the split reward system, not just one half of the transaction as you do and as Ryan did in his faulty analysis that promoted more masternode reward at the expense of mining reward:

MINERS:

 • They BUY the coin in the primary market
 • They SELL the coin in the secondary market which draws capital FROM that market
 • The coin ends up in the hands of a SECONDARY BUYER
 • The capital received from that secondary buyer ends up in the BLOCKCHAIN as increased difficulty

Ergo: miners are not net sellers. They are brokers who's job is to transfer capital from a market BUYER into the blockchain. This is the standard Satoshi model. It's why bitcoin now has a marketcap exceeding $1 Trillion. It's why Litceoin, Ethereum, Doge, XMR all have marketcaps far in excess of Dash despite being essentially service-free zones.

MASTERNODES

 • They receive the coin at zero cost
 • There is no realised capital transfer at that point
 • Any non-zero sales that masternodes make draws capital that does NOT find its way into the blockchain
 • So in bookkeeping terms the blockchain incurred a capital LOSS since a coin was issued and no primary market bid was created to counterbalance the secondary market sale (which is the case with mining)

Ergo: masternodes are net sellers

Conclusion: to sustain and grow marketcap in our split reward system, the masternode reward needs to be handled extremely conservatively. Perhaps 20% of the mining reward IMO. If we take it past that "sweet spot" we just tank the marketcap relative to fully mined which is what's been happening the past 3 years.

Is there ANY fully mined coin that we've exceeded in marketcap growth in the last 3 years ? There may be but I'm not aware of any. The reverse has been the case. That should worry you and every other Dash investor because the whole BASIS of our current store-of-value offering appears to be that we don't value mining. It's not working in competitive terms and shows no signs of doing so anytime soon.

Are you kidding ? Wind back a couple of years and watch a few Dash videos. You must'v been living in a different universe from me. Try using that message to attract any (long term) investment away from other crypto assets and see how you get on

Sure. We just got passed by ETC.

In May 2018 Bitcoin was at $7k, not near on 70k.

Nice effort

When you're driving a race with the handbrake on, tightning that handbrake a bit more isn't the last straw, it's simply not addressing the problem.

Similarly, Dash protocol issuing even more of its supply as a free gift to be chucked onto markets at any price with impunity is not going to be the last straw, it's simply not addressing the problem.


It did indeed lose the economic benefits of mining from half its supply. The role of mining would have been to bid up the opening price of that portion of the supply as it's issued from the chain. Instead we have all this stock sitting out there that can be dumped at any price and still make a profit for the holder while pulling precisely ZIP capital into the Dash economy. (Unlike mining where the revenue from exchange-dumped coins goes directly to bidding up primary supply price).

Doesn't mean Dash is not a great means of payment, great functional performer and has great useability. It just means that it's not great for investing in. The mining protocol had that job - that of allowing a trustless market to set the opening price for each new block.

Remember the opening price in that regard is NOT what the masternode or miner sells their coin for. It's the price the chain ISSUES it to them it at.

While some in the Dash community appear to have a hard time understanding that (your preverbial 'brick wall'), the wider market does'nt and values our marketcap accordingly.