"10 coins" was a matter of speaking of course.  To sustain $40 a single day, you must spend, indeed, about $40 000 a day.  With only one single million of dollars, you can sustain this for 25 days !  Now, we're talking about a "market cap" of near $300 million.  If you own half of it (which must grossly be the stash that the instaminers could have collected by investing each time in masternodes), that represents 0.6% of your holdings, 1 million dollars.   If you are willing to put, say, $60 000 a day, you can easily pump the price to $60.  Now, if you own half of the stash, you also get half of the other 1000 mined coins as a masternode reward, so you get already 500 coins "for free".  Once you're up to $60, you can dump those on newcomers, replenishing your spent amount of $.  Rince and repeat.
The only thing that brings an end to this, is when other DASH holders start dumping too, and want to take benefit.  You can't sustain paying THEM.  But they might not do so, if for that reason, they have to undo their few masternodes they have.   On the other hand, you get help from newbies suffering from FOMO who do the job in your place.

Essentially, it means that if you have a few million $ to play with, you can easily pump the price of DASH, because most is locked into masternodes (of which the centralized entity has probably half), and you indeed need ONLY to buy up the mining until people really start taking benefit, sacrificing their master nodes.

I think you are confusing three notions.  One is "unlimited" supply, the other is "infinite supply" and the third is "arbitrary supply".  You are arguing against "infinite supply" and "arbitrary supply".  Obviously, nothing with infinite supply can have any other market value than 0.  If the amount of coins in circulation are INFINITE, then of course, they are worth nothing.

Arbitrary supply means that there are entities which can create, *at any moment*, *any finite amount of extra supply*.  Although arbitrary supply means that at any moment in time, there's a finite number of coins in circulation, the amount of coins at the next moment is simply UNCERTAIN.  It could be N + n.  It could be N + 500 n.  The entities capable of supplying arbitrary amounts of coins, have access to arbitrary amounts of seigniorage, and can hence give themselves just ANY fraction of the market cap.  If there are 1000 coins in circulation today, they could decide suddenly that tomorrow, there are 1 million coins in circulation.

Although arbitrary supply could mean a finite market price for those entities NOT capable of creating coins, if they *really need it*, but they will try to have their minimum demand for it, so the market price of it will be whatever is the inelastic demand for it.  For instance, if I were a dictator, issuing coins at will, and making a law that any person on the street NOT in provable possession of k coins, will be shot on the spot without any further form of process, then the inelastic demand for my coins will be m x k, where m is the number of people not wanting to get shot.  I could print 100 times more of these coins, some smart dealers will buy them at some price from me, to sell a small part of it way way more expensively to the poor people needing these coins.  There WILL be a finite market price for these coins, even if I can emit an arbitrary supply of it.
BTW, this is more or less what a fiat system does, and the k coins are your due taxes which create an inelastic demand for fiat money.   But without the use of violence to impose an inelastic demand for them, usually they are worthless.

However, "unlimited supply" doesn't mean "infinite supply" nor "arbitrary supply".  It simply means that at a moment in time, the supply is N coins, and at a later moment in time, the supply is N + n coins.  Both these numbers are finite and KNOWN.

Now, whether that suite diverges AT INFINITY or not doesn't matter.  ANY emission scheme has a finite amount of emitted coins before the earth gets burned by the sun turning in a red giant 5 billion years from now.  

A coin emission that emits 5% of its existing stash every year will still have a finite and limited amount of coins in circulation 5 billion years from now.  The only difference between a coin with "unlimited supply" and a coin with "limited supply" is at time = infinity, when the coin (earth, humanity....) will not exist any more.

With a given emission scheme of which one can deterministically predict the amount of coins in circulation AT ANY FUTURE MOMENT, there is no difference between a coin with "finite supply" and a coin with "unlimited supply".  Take the coin with "unlimited supply", calculate how many coins there will be 5 billion years from now, and that is a finite number.  Well, what's the difference between such a coin, and a coin that will emit the same number of coins over 100 years, and then not emit anything any more ?  It simply took LONGER for the "unlimited supply" coin to get there, than the "limited supply coin" !  So it seems that the inflation of the "limited supply coin" was worse than the "unlimited supply coin".

Bitcoin, at this moment, still has several percent inflation.  It is worse in that respect than an unlimited supply coin with an emission rate of 1% inflation continuously.

I took the earth's end as ultimate limit, but of course, all monetary assets break down at a certain point, undergo hyperinflation, and are left for worth zero.  This will happen to every fiat currency (there is not one single fiat currency that has more than, say, 1000 years as far as I know) ; it will happen to every crypto currency, yes, to bitcoin too.  In 50 years, 150 years, or 500 years or 5000 years, bitcoin will be worthless, and forgotten apart from some historical fact.

This is the time scale over which an emission scheme should be looked at, and every scheme will have issued a finite amount of coins when the coin hyperinflates and becomes essentially worthless.  So there's no difference.

Monetary assets don't last for eternity, even though the monetary belief in it takes that for granted.  But the real idea is to get rid of it (in the hands of "greater fools") like a hot potato before it hyperinflates.  In the mean time, you can use it as a store of value, currency or speculative asset.

This is totally ridiculous.  The statement is essentially, that if ever the cryptography of, say, monero is broken, well, then it is broken and can be deanonymised.  Well, duh.  That's true with every cryptographic system: if it is broken, it doesn't work as expected.  If that is the "proof" that it WILL be broken, that's funny logic.

However, every coinjoin "anonymity", like the masternode mixing, is GIVING OUT the deanonymization information to the mixer owner.  Instead of being cryptographically protected, it is out in the clear for the mixer.  This is true for a bitcoin mixing service (the owner of the service has all the deanonymisation information and can decide to keep this record for ever), and is true for the master nodes in DASH, which are nothing else but smart contract mixing services.   With the master nodes, however, there are successive mxings, and so the master nodes have to COLLUDE for the deanonymisation of the whole chain.  With "4000 master nodes" that seems like an impossible task, to have them collude.  However, the failure of this scheme is that there are maybe a few tens of people owning the large majority of the master nodes.  A few tens of people colluding (by water hosing for instance, by bribing, by making offers that are hard to refuse) is much, much more probable than a cryptographic scheme grossly failing.

In fact, DASH's anonymity scheme is similar to using several bank accounts in different countries, to "mix fiat transactions".  The knowledge is in the banks, but the full path is only exposed when one has all the account transactions.  Which will take some time for a judge.   But the "anonymity" is only just as good as the quality of the banking secrets kept by banks.  The US government sometimes makes "offers (even Swiss) banks have difficulties refusing".

Why on earth would you want to compete with fiat on its own domain  ?   Fiat is unbeatable concerning compliance, rapidity, acceptance.   Crypto can never win from fiat if it wants to be compliant, fast, practical and generally accepted, because of the burden or decentralized consensus.  Fiat doesn't have this burden, and can use centralized authorities to be much more lean, swift, and compliant.


Then use fiat.  Why would you need a block chain and a decentralized consensus, if an authority is to dictate what should be the "consensus" ?

I don't think bitcoin's problems are going to be solved.  Bitcoin is now what it is, and nothing significant will ever change.  Bitcoin is nearing its "full capacity", and if it tries to get beyond that, it will not work.

Now that bitcoin is nearly "full", it is time to diversify.  DASH doesn't solve bitcoin's problems, at all.  But DASH not being full at all yet, and having about 4 times its capacity of transactions, it can go quite a distance before the same problems appear.  However, DASH being totally centralized in the hands of Evan, there's no consensus to be had, and Evan can change the DASH protocol, its emission scheme, its block size at his will.  He probably owns more than half of the master nodes, and hence has full control of the "community vote", voting whatever protocol change he wants.  DASH is a centralized crypto, with all the flexibility that comes with it.

But as of now, DASH doesn't solve any fundamental problem in bitcoin.  The instant pay system is nothing else but a kind of master-node certified mem pool.  But all transactions, in the end, have to go on the block chain, just as with bitcoin.  The miners decide that.  Just as with bitcoin.  When room on the block becomes scarce, there's no difference.  But, at the moment, DASH's blocks are 4 times bigger than bitcoin's, so its capacity is 4 times larger.  That pushes the hard wall bitcoin is hitting somewhat further away.  And Evan can vote any block size increase if ever it pleases him.  No hassle about any consensus. The great advantage of a centralized system. 

So, even if DASH doesn't solve any of bitcoin's problems, it can overtake quite some "bitcoin load" before it hits the same wall, and being centralized, its central controller can always "move the wall" with a single 'vote'.

I don't think people making market prices in crypto really care about that.  In fact, it might even reassure them, because in as much as people superficially shout "decentralization", most crypto traders (of exchange IOU) prefer in fact centralized systems.  There is much less chance of a few rich, centralized entities "crashing their own market", than the chance of a panic movement of a large crowd.  In fact, in the "greater-fool" game that most crypto is, low liquidity and centralized whales are much more reassuring for smart traders than genuine usage and genuine fluid markets.  There are "people you can make deals with" and pre-knowledge has market significance ; while a true, liquid and efficient market is fair and unpredictable and hence has no advantage for a trader over another one.

So I wouldn't count DASH out.  This is going to go extremely high.  And the instamine and PoS which makes Evan a whale that has full control, and probably half of the stash, while superficially "bad", is a dream for smart money.  This is the best honey pot for greater fools that has ever been made.

This is why I hope it will overtake bitcoin one day, with DASH's fake market cap.  Duffield is a true genius.  He perfectly understood how to pump money out of greater fools, way before others.   The only other guy of similar insight is probably Vitalik, but he came too late with his PoS scheme in order to "lock in" ethereum at his will.  Where Duffield succeeded in being the total central master of a succesful crypto, Vitalik failed bitterly.

Oops.  I thought that Evolution was meant to solve bitcoin's problems.  But to overtake it, you should aim for $3000 at least.  $300 was to overtake ethereum.

No, seriously, I would love to see DASH overtake ethereum.  I would also love to see it overtake bitcoin but I think that's not for immediately right now.  Bitcoin first has to get much deeper into problems before that can happen.  But I seriously would love to see it happening.  Once a coin like DASH can overtake bitcoin, many altcoins can, because the sacred cow is then sacrificed, and DASH has more chances to do so with its extremely centralized distribution and its very low liquidity.

I'm somewhat disappointed that it stopped there.  I really thought it was going for $300 or so right away.

With their 10 coins in circulation, that shouldn't be too difficult now, should it ?

In fact, the error in DASH's scheme is that ultimately, the transaction is still written on the block chain.  Instant X is nothing else but a kind of certified mem pool confirmation.  But if DASH hits the same bottleneck as bitcoin does, and there is a huge mem pool lag with miners picking only the most lucrative transactions out of the pool to make full blocks, your instant-X confirmed transaction may very well never end up on the block chain, just like with bitcoin.  

So what is the value of an instant-x confirmed transaction that ends up not being on the block chain ?

In fact, one should push the logic to the extreme, and not write transactions on the chain any more, but just balances.  If you trust that 15 random master nodes validate a transaction, one could just as well have them validate the new account states.  And then, there's not really a need for a block chain with transactions any more !  Only a shared ledger between masternodes.  You might still maintain a small block chain BETWEEN master nodes, where regular "states of accounts" get their hash registered (and only their hash).  But the master nodes maintain the balances (which are distributed on demand to the normal nodes, as well as the masternode block chain and the active mem pool, to verify that the latest balance has its hash on that chain, and that the current balance is the right "latest hash stamped balance" on which the mem pool transactions have been applied.  Say that every 12 hours, a "current balance" hash is produced by the master nodes, and written to the block chain.  So there are 2 entries A DAY on the current block chain.  That makes for a tiny chain, doesn't it !  There's the day's mempool worth of transactions which is shared by all nodes, and updated by the instant-X scheme of master nodes, and there's the masternodes' shared "current state of balances" (the delta wrt to the last stamped state of balances), which is the net result of all the mempool transactions.  

And that's it.

Very light-weight.  Very small block chain.   The only thing that normal nodes can do, is download, each time when they are active, the last stamped balance sheet, verify that this corresponds to the hash on the chain, and the active mem pool, verifying that this mempool corresponds to the the difference between the last stamped balance sheet, and the current active balance state (which will become stamped soon).  

So no, you cannot verify old individual transactions "when you were not there".  Yes, as long as you are an active normal node, you can verify that the balances are updated correctly.

You've just re-invented normal banking.

All transactions HAVE BEEN public.  Normal nodes COULD HAVE recorded them (and kept the whole "block chain of transactions").  But the network can forget this for normal operation.  A newcomer cannot verify how the balances got to their actual state, but can verify *from that moment onward* that all transactions correspond to all balance movements, and as long as he stays connected.   If he "hooks off", he has to trust that the system continues to work that way, and that others to the verifications.  

Some normal nodes may keep the full records.  These full records are equivalent to the full block chain of transactions.  All signed transactions from the recorded mem pools come down to the block contents of bitcoin like block chains.  But they don't have to be shared by all nodes.  Nodes are only interested in the DELTA of balances when they are active.  The don't care about how the balances got there (and if they are interested, they can try to obtain "full block chain information").  But there's no need to do this for current transactions to go on.  You can have a daily 10 GB worth of transaction pool, which you can forget about once the balances are updated and stamped.

Ah, Spartacus

Dark markets are essentially related to drugs because states have made drugs a high risk/highly lucrative business, by outlawing them, and by pruning the commerce sufficiently for the threat to be credible, but not sufficiently to kill it all together.  In other words, dark markets selling drugs are a product of the state.  Normally, drugs are cheap to make, and offer would normally swamp demand, resulting in extremely low prices of drugs, for people wanting to use it ; much, much cheaper than quality food, for instance.

In order to use dark markets, and hence finance the costs of the risk of illegality, there must be an incentive that allows the price setting to be higher than the "legal" way of doing this.  With drugs, there simply isn't a legal way, and as there is a significant inelastic demand, one has the potential to have very high margins, which is exactly why states do this: to finance drugs cartels, which, in turn, allow the state to justify their taxations, spendings, and liberticide measures.  The same reasons btw why they finance and organize terrorism.

But dark markets are not automatically related to drugs.  They are also related to everything where there is an inelastic demand, and for which the "legal" way becomes too expensive, too "bad quality" or too restrictive.  With the advancement of communism, over-regulation, heavy taxation, and privileged handing-out of licences, states are pushing other markets into dark markets.  During WWII, when quality food was rationed (and essentially confiscated by the German army for their troops), there were dark markets for quality butter, eggs and so on.   In the US, during the alcohol prohibition, there were dark markets for wine and whiskey.   Where I live, there are already dark markets for housekeeping, gardening and other low-level services, which are way too expensive if you do it "officially" (called "black work"), simply because taxation is of the order of 2/3 of the net value exchange.  There are already dark markets for homework help for similar reasons.  I live in Europe, and with the bankruptcy of the "caring state" and the souvereign debt crisis that is building up from it, the high immigration levels (I have nothing against immigration as such, but we are not importing "people", we are importing poverty, which is then socialised over the whole of society until it cracks) taxation of quality goods and services of which there is inelastic demand can only skyrocket.

So, for me, dark markets are not related to drugs.  Drugs use dark markets because the conditions of the drugs market have been set up by the state that they are suited for dark markets (inelastic demand, and high "legal" costs).  But a lot of other things will be pushed that way, and already are ; things of daily life.

This is why I am a great defender of dark markets.  

BTW, I also evolved from liberalism, to minarchism, to anarcho-capitalism to full anarchy.

I think you can't really win against a violence monopolist that is after you.  However, you can do your thing with a violence monopolist that doesn't know you really exist.

You see, my hope for crypto is actually much more down-to-earth.  I think that we are moving towards a from of global communism, with tax rates close to 95% or even 99%.  Right now effective tax levels are of the order of 70%, which means that on every economical interaction, both parties need to produce 3 times more than what they obtain in the trade.  If I want to trade my apple for your orange, I need to produce 3 apples, and you need to produce 3 oranges, so that I can obtain 1 orange, and you can obtain one apple.  I think this factor will go up to 20, or even to 100 in the near future when global communism diverges.  Which means that if I officially want to trade one apple against one orange, I need to produce 20 apples or even 100 apples, and you will need to produce 20 oranges, or even 100 oranges, so that I obtain 1 orange, and you obtain 1 apple.

Under such taxation, no economic freedom can exist, but we will all get a lot of very low quality state service and have to do a lot of very useless work, to obtain very large bruto wages, which are then pruned off, to only have a few percent of it as genuine buying power outside of state support which is abundant, but of extremely low quality, except for an elite which will live in relatively large luxury.  Of course, under such severe taxation levels, the slightest bit of non-taxed economic activity will be actively repressed.
It is to fight those circumstances that I see "small, local crypto" as useful, where small underground local economic relationships can make life a lot better.  Joe grows some real vegetables (almost impossible to obtain through state support), and trades them for some quality education for his children, given by a neighbour that is knowledgeable of mathematics (quality education will be totally absent in state educational systems, which are just brainwashing institutions where the bare minimum to do your Amazon job is thought with totally inadequate teaching methods), and another neighbour that is knowledgeable of english.  Someone else is a medical doctor, and is helping people secretly getting better - public health services are of extremely bad quality and no-one ever gets cured there.  Local networks of people help each other underground, and for that they need a local kind of currency.  It allows you to get one-another some quality food, quality education, quality medical help, quality personal assistance, .... all things that are done in small local economies.  The small amount of economic needs outside of these local communities, like some electronic devices that work, that are not entirely compromised by state hackers and so on, will need more global currencies ; but this is much more dangerous to do - so one can use the little economic power-after-tax to buy these few "global" things that can hardly be locally produced.  But most of the "dark market economy" is simply locally grown quality food, local personal services to one-another (education, medical help, personal help like keeping children, helping older people.,...), and such things.  It is too dangerous to set up any material production.  And yes, some people will  get caught, but if the networks are sufficiently local, small, distributed and changing, the system can not be brought down as a whole.
It is this kind of "dark market" that I hope things like monero (clones ?) can help when global communism will set in.

I will take that as a compliment

We don't want speculators, do we ?  Nothing stops them from trading IOU on centralized exchanges.


That's nevertheless what is currently the case in the fiat world.  How many national currencies exist ?  And in a certain way, every single bank has its own currency (usually denominated in its national bank currency, but it is not the same).  There are value tokens for meals, there are value tokens in super markets,....  Of course, many of them are tied together.  Nothing stops currencies from tying together.

My idea is that a web of relatively small, relatively new, relatively local currencies has no point of failure, and can never be taken down, centralized, put under any control what so ever, because by the time TPTB try to get the control of one, it has already collapsed and has been replaced by 10 others.

But in fact, maybe our two ideas are closer than we think.  What I call "a currency" might very well be simply a "payment channel", and what I call a small distributed exchange, might just as well be a link with a block chain type of currency.

If I share a 'currency' with 10 trading partners and that's about the scope of the currency, which is then linked to a few "neighbouring currencies" on a few local distributed exchanges kept running by some of us, and some other people, this is maybe similar to the 10 of us sharing a payment channel, and a "distributed exchange" being a kind of lightning node style of link to a block chain currency.

What is important to me, is that the protocols, the technology, the emission schemes, and all that are all different and change all the time.

I understand that you think that, and this must also be what people think when they ask for "crypto regulation" and crypto law and so on.  But I think there's a fundamental problem when you do that.

There's simply no point in *partial trustlessness* even though in practice, there CAN only be partial trustlessness, but that is nothing else but risk taking, which is unavoidable.
Because if there is partial trustlessness, it means that there is partial trust.  If there is partial trust, there is a trusted party, or there are trusted parties.  Once you have trusted parties, you can USE that trust to "lock in" the trust on anything else, and you can use a centralized system, ultimately controlled by that trusted entity, or those trusted entities, to impose the "trustability" in a top-down hierarchy of trust.
And then, there's simply NO REASON any more to have anything distributed and trustless, because all systems can be trusted, or can be made trustworthy in a top-down hierarchy, deriving their trust from the initially trusted entities which were assumed to exist.

And that's exactly, exactly, how our modern fiat systems work.  That's also how DASH works.  And it is way, way, way simpler to do things.  Once you have a trusted entity on which you can build an entire hierarchy of centralized trust, essentially all difficulties crypto is facing are gone.  Instead of block chains and miners, you use swift and central banks.  Instead of master nodes, you use commercial banks and audits by trusted inspectors.  Etc.

Trustlessness, and decentralized crypto, are simply meaningless from the moment there are trusted entities.

Indeed.


I didn't know I was part of the monero community and I think that many in the monero community think it will be THE coin everyone is using, but I have no illusions.  Monero is way, way better than bitcoin, but it is still lacking a lot of features to hope to become tomorrow's currency for millions of people.  I don't see a single currency becoming tomorrow's currency.  I see potentially a web of gazillions of currencies, connected by gazillions of distributed exchanges.  That ever changing environment, with no single protocol, with no single dynamics, with currencies rising and collapsing, with continuously different technologies, would be a true decentralized, and uncentralizable entity.

Triple Amen.

This is exactly why I dislike DASH.  Although I understand that the technology used by DASH needs governance in order to have trusted mixers.  DASH is the best one could do for anon without advanced crypto tech like ring signatures or zero knowledge proofs, but it meant the end of decentralisation.  As such, DASH did what it had to do: build a fiat-like system.

It should change its name to DIAT: digital fiat.

I'm sorry, but that is similar to going in the arena where one "fights without rules" and then complain that the fight wasn't fair, because you got seriously hurt by the guy with a sledge hammer.

Trustlessness is the principle where one tries to set up systems that avoid being broken in an environment where all players try to break the system.  Don't cry if you used a system that turned out to be broken and don't accuse people of having broken the system, right ?


Of course you can "try to prevent it" by building systems that, well, make it impossible to do so.  But you cannot "try to prevent it" by complaining about it.  Because if you do so, then you leave the notion of trustlessness.  And from that point on, you don't NEED a lot of cryptography, and you don't need "consensus algorithms resistant to 51% attack", and you don't need distributed ledgers.   But then you need "points of trust", those who can intervene in order to prevent it.  And these points of trust accumulate power, and accumulate wealth.  And at some point, maybe they cannot be trusted, after all.  And we have a fiat system ; or something in between, like DASH, with its more or less centralized "points of trust" and the wealth that flows to the centralized controllers.  And if that is what one wanted, after all, DASH is finally not a scam.  It is a kind of fiat system, with "points of trust" that will look after the functioning of the system, and get (take) a lot of power and wealth in return.


I agree it is a bad thing, but that was the game: make systems that are *resistant* to bad things.


Well, that is exactly what is the goal of a trustless system: where lies, deception and trickery are not able to have any impact on the outcome of events.  In as much as it works, the system as a trustless system, failed.  If you invested in a system of which you convinced yourself that it was trustless, and it failed, then there's nothing wrong with you losing your entire investment: you made a big mistake.

You can say: yes, but they ASSURED ME that it was a correct trustless system.  But that is exactly part of what you should verify, because this deceiving is what the system should be resistant against.  If this deception works out, it means that the system didn't resist, and hence was a bad trustless system.  So again, it means you invested in a broken concept, which means that it is perfectly normal that you lose your input.

No, not at all.  I run an empty dash node on an old server for the fun of it.  I do not possess one single dash.  I used to have 2 or 3 dash, to be able to play with it, because I was interested in the anon aspect of it.  When it turned out that I needed more money even to be able to use "darksend" (as it was called back then), I sold them.

I never put more than a few tens of $ in crypto, unless I need to buy something more expensive.

My hope for high DASH prices (and falsely turned into high market cap, but it is good publicity for the gullible) is that it might shake out established beliefs about the superiority of one coin over another.

This is my stance on it:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1808840.msg18033162#msg18033162

tl;dr: it is not a scam because the notion of scam cannot exist in a trustless environment.

It is a crypto system, mainly centralized in the hands of a "central banker", and all this is documented, so if you use that system in a trustless environment, it means that you did your homework and agreed, or it means that you don't care, or it means that you are careless.