I think losing market rank is far more important, because you're right that volatility plagues almost all cryptos. Dash is relatively fork resistant, but that means it's less likely for people to end up with private keys on multiple forks in an effective stock split that increases to total value of their holdings.

You are also right that there is a "tussel for power" wherever resources are pooled, but Dash has a strange problem of extremely active moderators of forums who have been quick to ban people, shadow ban people and censor content in a way that's indicative of promoting rather than impartially discussing our project, the management, governance, funding, etc.  The problem got so great that three discord channels and three subreddits emerged, but the main forums are locked in by network effects and moderated by most of the same people as the original treasury funded ones. The relationships formed by the people getting money and the people most responsible for dispensing pooled funds remained and now it's less transparent than ever.

How is Joel Valenzuela AKA thedesertlynx for example getting paid now with no visible means of support beyond tips? He continues to operate as a media guy, moderator and tech tester, apparently having a normal life with no time for a paid job. You could say it's none of my business, but he pops up and savages other projects, people who challenge the status quo, and critics of favored proposals, threatening people for breaking rules he arguably breaks himself regularly while participating in the discussions, even though he's not even a MNO but a moderator with voting keys (delegate). If he's acting like a hatchet man and seems to have the lifestyle of a hatchet man and no other obvious way to pay the bills, what are the victims of his hatchet supposed to think? I'm not saying there's more than circumstantial evidence, but there's no transparency either, and he's just one example. Another moderator, Agnew Pickens got in the middle of a productive discussion diverting the conversation and when I challenged him on it replied "don't tip me chump change, Boy." These are not isolated incidences. This is a pattern i have observed for a long time, and not just with me.

It doesn't take much for a good cowboy to steer the herd, just a little pressure in the right places. I wouldn't mind but there are indications that they are steering the herd off a cliff (again), as I and others had tried to prevent before, unsuccessfully. I told them if we didn't fix the Pay and Pray funding model, that eventually the market would reduce our spending options involuntarily, which is how it actually played out. Now the percentage of dash backing masternodes is dropping along with our market rank. ANY suggestions by anybody to do something concrete about it are suppressed or diverted. This is especially concerning because of the large amount of dash with loans against it and the danger of a de-leveraging feedback loop that could cause a dramatic crash and loss of value for thee savings of people we MNOs are supposed to protect.

The Dash DAO sunk enormous amounts of money into growing adoption in emerging markets, many of whom are at severe risk of humanitarian crisis if Covid-19 has an outbreak, due to lack of medicine, healthcare infrastructure, high urban population density and corrupt disfunctional political regimes. The DAO also risks retaliation from the US government if it interprets our attempts to help as aiding in evading sanctions. We were not expecting and are not prepared for a prolonged economic downturn in the wider economy, the cryptoverse, or Dash specifically. Coronavirus, the trade war,  recession, a major hack, theft or exit scam from a major coin with high price correlation, any one of these things could be a black swan or combine into a perfect storm and the MNOs don't have the lines of communication to deal with it because we farmed out our responsibilities to mercenaries. WE MNOs as a group are being reckless with the savings entrusted to us and the owners and buyers of dash should be warned. Sure, we might get away with it, but the public deserves to know the risk.

UPDATE: I'm getting significant hostility, but it's coming from the right people: voting delegates, MNOs with many nodes who also request money from the treasury and vote for themselves, and moderators of the major forums. Small investors and single node MNOs have been quietly giving support, which means a lot to me because it's them i feel are least represented.

It's way too soon to see how this will play out, but I feel good that I'm doing the right thing. I think Dash will be hardened by fire, not incinerated by it because I believe it's anti-fragile, but time will tell. The market, as always, gets the last word.

Thank you to all the people who privately sent me messages of support. It means a lot, because I'm being pilloried as expected and it helps me endure the heat.

I's like to point out that I believe it's us Masternode owners who are primarily responsible for the current state of dash, by lazy delegation of our governance responsibilities to voting delegates, to DCG and media representatives and other employees who often sincerely believe their own hype. Basically it doesn't matter if it was greed or bad judgement that caused the systemic problems because the effect was the same.

It's not about me or any other single person or group of people. It's the incentive structure that needs to change for Dash to live up to it's full potential. The thing that is most preventing that in my view is control of the major forums by people either with poor judgement or selfish intent and the network effects that keep us on those forums.

Network effects are very powerful, and one reason I believe Dash is doing so poorly relative to other altcoins, despite it's many problems because other alts have serious problems too.And obviously NE could be a reason other projects aren't doing as well as Dash. We are older than most of them, after all.

It is a lot to take in, and I'm sorry if I'm being uncharitable to the people who sincerely believe they are doing the right thing for Dash by doing the right thing for themselves, but I believe they are biased at best and dishonest at worst. When I say "cabal" I'm not talking about a conspiracy (at least not that I know of), but about an alignment of interest that amounts to a tragedy of the commons, a resource that is being over-exploited due to individual self-interest and pooled money. 

I forgot to mention the role of voting delegates, people entrusted with voting keys to vote in the real MasterNode owner's interest, but who often vote in their own. This lack of oversight I believe has been costly.  It only takes a few votes to swing a 49% vote to a 51% vote. (our spending votes are a little more complicated than that, but you get the idea).

Insider's view of Dash's corruption
I've been a Dash masternode owner for two years and a dashhole for 3. During that time, I've witnessed a corrupt system get even more corrupt to the point now where it's basically all that holds the whole thing together. The public needs to know.

The corruption is centered around, what else, money. Various factions- miners, treasury feeders, and moderators fight for their share of the spoils and they fight dirty. They key is control of the forums on discord and reddit. With crypto, money is information and whoever controls the information flow controls the purse strings. As dash has slipped in market rank, from #3 to currently #20 on coinmarketcap and a loss of >94% of value, the fight for spoils has not abated but in fact intensified at the expense of the hodlers.

I told the other MNOs that if we didn't control treasury spending, eventually the market would force us to, and that's exactly what happened.

Miners also want to protect their 45% of block rewards even if it means giving a big chunk to power companies for marginal extra security. They also post coins as collateral for loans rather than selling to save on taxes and to create artificial scarcity. It's from this extra profit that they pay the toll to the gatekeepers and block any attempts to reduce their allocation.

Dash Core Group is attempting to potentially double the allocation of the treasury from 10% to 20% because they have a declared self-imposed cap of taking 60% of treasury asks and they suspect (and I agree) that 60% won't be enough if de-leveraging continues. Masternode owners are basically held hostage because we have no alternative if we de-fund them. The bullshit rationale that the Dash trust "owns" DCG is just that, because it does no good to own something you can't sell and can't control.

Another way the the controlling looters and pillagers from the inside are insulating themselves from a investor revolt is by establishing the Dash Investment Trust, basically a war chest and rainy day fund to keep them going even if hodlers and regular MNOs can't.

Venezuela is in the process of being cut loose, after the Cabal finally realized what I had been saying all along: it's a money sink and not a profit center. VE and to a lesser extent other emerging markets were merely a way to goose adoption statistics while adding almost no real value.

Dash transaction fees are also crazy low, and that allows the cabal to fake real TX volume for a low cost.

The much-anticipated second layer upgrade Evolution, now renamed Platform is also massively behind schedule, despite assurances that it's right around the corner.

With the trade war, corona virus, supply chain disruptions, and massive debt putting downward pressure on the broader economy, and Dash's pre-occupation for looting crypto- buyers and hodlers, I can't in good conscience recommend buying Dash at this time. If Dash is to be fixed, it won't be by the same people who turned it into what it is today.

The legacy of the insta-mine lives on in the Dash culture and anyone hoping for Moon and Lambos, or even price stability may be sorely disappointed, at least until a de-leveraging of the millions of dash effectively with loans against it one way or another and/or a substantial housecleaning takes place. Please feel free to re-post this expose wherever and as often as you see fit.

I wish I had better news, but the truth is the truth. It is possible central bank money printing or a general crypto bull market will lift Dash along with it, but The blockchain is getting longer, chainlocks for instant send, private send and eventually Platform functions will will increase the cost of operating a masternode while the service rewards go down, so it just doesn't seem like a good investment relative to other opportunities at this time, or at least dangerous for those who have too much exposure.

I haven't been able to log into uphold.com. It is telling me I've made too many requests. Is this just a problem for me?

Am I the only one who can't log into uphold.com? I've been trying for ten hours. It says i've made too mady requests.

I can live with that definition.

I believe there are many investors who would invest in Dash who don't because they don't like how we spend our money. I can't prove it, but nobody can prove it's not true either unless we stop wasting treasury funds on risky proposals as much. 

Does fattening Maduro's sheep benefit the sheep more than it benefits Maduro? Even if we were funding a political revolution in VZ, is that what treasury funds are for? Or is this Nike-like virtue signaling? Judging by the performance of Nike stock and the price of Dash, it appears similar to me.

MNOs have a fiduciary obligation to all Dash holders to maximize trading price on a long term time scale. I believe we are failing them.

So if there is no system that is more just, then capitalism is the best we've got. "Fair" is a completely subjective term anyway. Is it fair that I can't be a pro basketball player no matter how hard I practice because I'm too short and lack the natural talent?  How lame would it be to watch Bball if it WAS more fair? (actually we know. It would be the WNBA).  

So right. It's not even supposed to be a system of justice, because the only way to make everybody equal is to kill everybody and make us all equally dead.  Anything that works in that direction (like Communism) only differs by a matter of degree.  Capitalism makes most people a little better off and a few people much better off.  Pareto wealth distribution actually remains about the same in every economic and political system. This is because there are a few hyperproductive people in any society, a lot of moderately productive people and some non-productive people.

I'm not saying people who are economically nonproductive have no value. I'm saying they have no economic value. Helping these people should be an individual choice. Helping them with treasury funds is effectively stealing resources from our community to fund the pet charity project of the majority of MNOs at the expense of the minority and other stakeholders.

What if we actually DO prevent a collapse in Venezuela? Doesn't that mean the Communist regime stays in power? Russians are better off after the Soviet Union collapsed. Often things have to get worse before they get better, and I fear that is exactly what needs to happen for the Dash community to see that subsidizing economies based on public and private theft is not a good investment strategy.

There is an old saying: "Charity begins at home". This is because we know better who needs charity and who best deserves help with local information.

I'm not against Dash in VZ, but I am against spending too much treasury there because I think it's a good possibility we are just fattening up the sheep for Maduro to sheer. Or skin. Their currency isn't "going down the toilet" accidentally. This is what happens when theft becomes a country's top industry.

There is no conflict between personal profit and improving people's lives in a free market. Profit is the reward entrepreneurs get for serving their fellow man efficiently. In real capitalism, every trade is win-win because if it wasn't it wouldn't happen.

No, YOU'RE missing the point. Capitalism is about managing capital. It's about rewarding the productive and punishing the unproductive. Not all, but many of the "underserved" are net leeches who consuming wealth. Not all rich people deserve their wealth and not all poor people deserve their poverty, but over time the productive get wealthier and the unproductive get poorer generally in a free economy. 

Those greedy capitalists are giving those poor people jobs, and it's their capital that makes the poor more productive, for the same reason a backhoe driver is more productive than a guy with a shovel. They did it because they saved (or somebody did) when others spent.

The Venezuelans and the Zimbabweans ELECTED those thieves originally because they only thaught the thief/politicians would steal from the rich. Well guess what? They stole from everybody they could. That's what thieves do, and it's hard to feel sorry for them as a group. SOME were unfairly punished, but punishing me when I saved doesn't mean more justice. It means less. You wanna fight poverty? Don't be poor. It's a great first step.

Your offense is my amusement. Your echo chamber can't protect you from the market.

He's never tried to censor my speech and he's never called me "billy boy", so he's got more class than you or the Dash Mafia as far as I'm concerned.

I own no Monero.  I think Fluffypony is a pretentious pompous ass, but we have more than a few of those ourselves. Mainstream adoption means MAINSTREAM, not the poorest people we can find to set up some kind of experimental crypto utopia.

Venezuelans will always be poor as long as their government and private bandits steal their stuff. We might be able to help them keep SOME wealth, but not all of it. It is a drain of value for the foreseeable future. Charities are fine. Helping people is fine, but it's not a salvation for sinking market cap or market rank. It's not a ticket to mass adoption.

Entrepreneurs risk their time and capital all the time. It's a defining characteristic and they would work for us too if we weren't wasting all our treasury on making bets on projects that may or may not pay off. We are not even paying bills but we are making bets. Their is a name for people who do that: DEGENERATE GAMBLERS.

FIFY

Banking the unbanked is not a business plan. It's a charity. Does housing the homeless sound like a good business plan? if not, why are we dumping money into wealth-destroying regions with no history of respecting property rights?

MNOs are lousy bankers, backing failing project after project. Just pay for stuff AFTER we get it.  Why is this so hard to grasp?