toknormal I read through your post, and I have spent some time thinking about it and researching it. I find it worrying that you write with such precision but your writings are filled with such inaccuracies and inccorrect statements. I'm sure investors look up to you which is why this is even more worrying.
Dash and XMR are not comparable in their objectives.
One is implementing a functionally diverse form of decentralisation that is going to manage everything from anonymity to network quality control and performance while the other is no more than an an off-the-shelf technology for 'hiding transactions' shared by 20 other projects.
You do the cryptography in Monero a disservice when you describe it as off-the-shelf. Ring signatures are not new cryptography but the application in Monero is definitely innovative.
I also haven't seen anything formal from Evan about "network quality control and performance", have you?
In my research I have also found a section on the Monero website that seems to describe a lot more than just 'technology for hiding transactions'. Have you seen that page? It's this one
https://getmonero.org/design-goals/One is compliant with the entire bitcoin legacy commercial infrastructure and APIs, the other isn't (whatever you think the merits of that are). One works like Bitcoin with recognisable procedures for managing blockchain addresses, transmitting funds, the other still doesn't even have a cross platform GUI wallet.
If I had to guess I'd say 99% of the merchants out there use Bitpay or Coinbase or one of the others for interacting with Bitcoin, so I am not sure this is much of a problem, if at all.
I also think it's very cheeky of you to make a statement like this as if attributing the API compatability or the Dash GUI wallet to Evan's hard work. You and I both know that he hasn't worked on any of that from scratch. Maybe we can give him credit for minor changes to the Bitcoin GUI.
One is the original anonymous-money project and is now consolidating and advancing the whole feature set, of which pre-emptive anonymisation is only one. The other is a one trick pony that will be banging the same drum for its existence in months and years to come.
See above.
One has a dev who adds value to the project day in day out according to a clearly defined roadmap that gets delivered on consistently. It's hard to know if the other has any devs at all.
Now you're just lying, toknormal, and that's doing harm to the whole Dash community. Why would you lie on something so obviously wrong?
Dash has nobody competent besides Evan now that vertoe has left!
I used the People Behind Monero page on the Monero website,
https://getmonero.org/knowledge-base/people, and I researched all the people there. They are mostly people who have been in the cryptocurrency community for years. They've been on Bitcointalk since 2011-2013, except for NoodleDoodle and eizh that have only been on Bitcointalk since the beginning of 2014. On that page they also list 8 other developers who have contributed and they link to their github pages.
If you click on github contributors page link on that page it lists 25 contributors. Most of those contributors have contributed only to Monero. What I mean is if you look at the Dash github page,
https://github.com/darkcoin/darkcoin/graphs/contributors, the top 5 contributors are working on Bitcoin not on Dash, they don't even care about Dash. If you look on the Monero page there's only amjuares that worked on Bytecoin BCN and everyone else is a Monero developer. Even vertoe worked on Monero!
You are passionate about Dash but it is easy to see that Monero has quite a number of developers. I don't think it's good to compare Dash to Monero on that.
As I pointed out in another thread, Dash is now starting to deliver the fruits of it's dual layer, service-oriented approach (they will be many) in the latest release which implements decentralised quality minimums for the network.
This is *proper* decentralisation folks - functional diversification. Not reproducing the same mono-dimensional robot operation a million times (thats called redundancy). The first ever cryptocurrency network that is going to check itself for quality and performance standards on an ongoing basis. (What flight computers do for example).
Although that's a pretty mundane feature from a user's point of view, it's the type of stuff that makes a network useable and practical which has been one of the highest priorities for the Dash project since its inception = 'make it useable'.
So I did some research on decentralization. My starting point was Wikipedia,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_system. That page has a very good description right at the beginning that I want to paste for you. 'A centralised system is one in which a
central controller exercises control over the
lower-level components of the system directly or through the use of a power hierarchy (such as instructing a middle level component to instruct a lower level component).' Doesn't that sound like MasterNodes?
I know your answer is going to be that MasterNodes don't 'exercise control' but they do. You've just said that they are going to influence performance, which is exercising control. And we definitely know that they act on behalf of Dash users when they are mixing. By that definition the Dash network is 'centralized' and I don't think it's right to argue it any other way.
The Wikipedia article continues, and I think its important to go over some of the sentences and contrast it with Dash and Bitcoin/Monero, because this is a Dash vs Monero thread.
'A decentralised system, on the other hand, is one in which complex behaviour emerges through the work of
lower level components operating on local information, not the instructions of any commanding influence.'
In Dash the lower level components (nodes) don't operate on local information. They rely on the MasterNodes to exert control and provide information and provide structure.
'This form of control is known as distributed control, or control in which
each component of the system is equally responsible for contributing to the global, complex behaviour by acting on local information in the appropriate manner.'
This is the clearest indication, for me, where we see that Dash is centralized. The components in Dash are not equal. MasterNodes have way more power than ordinary nodes, and that means they are controlling things.
There are other excellent points in that Wikipedia article but I think the point is clear, and that is that Dash is centralized, Bitcoin and Monero are not.
