Why Dash is not a scam, but a scheme

[wopakee]

People complains about Dash, formerly Darkcoin, formerly Xcoin, being instamined and not rightfully propagated.
Well, I think there are some things that we need to reconsider before we actually come to this conclusion.

A) The history.

When Xcoin was launched, it had no other features that any other coin didn't have. It was a restart and a copy with no unique features. It was worthless, and it got distributed through an "instantaneous mining"(1.9m coins out of current 4.9m supply within 8 hours).

What these miners got is a humongous amount of Xcoin, which in itself was nothing but a copied coin. Lucky few, they probably had 100's of thousands of Xcoins, worth about 0.1btc/100,000 or something at that time.

One month later, actual progress had been made, and the coin attained a small value, the community voted to change the name to 'Darkcoin', because anonymity was the goal, and even though it wasn't fully implemented yet, people had started to believe in the development.

 
So now the coin was called Darkcoin. Progress was being made and 3 months later it was no longer the Xcoin that was once launched. Just as like a skyscraper that had started taking form, from just being an architecture with a lot of guesswork, now something actual had been created, and it was called Darkcoin. Still not fully anonymous, and lots of bugs left to be solved, but yet interesting enough to have caught a lot of attention.

Continued development brought stability to the coin, and it finally got to the point where the original goal of anonymity had been reached. But new opportunities had opened up, the masternode network turned out to bring a whole new platform to the market, so it was a given to continue expanding on it.

Yet again a community vote was made for changing the name from the somewhat obscure 'Darkcoin', to 'Dash'. Why was this appropriate? Because the development had reached far beyond Darkcoin, Darkcoin was the nymph that hatched into something much bigger and the incentives had changed.

The distribution is history, it's an integrated part of the project, and it laid the foundation for what we have now.

B) Relaunch is not an option.

Because if this were to be relaunched, it wouldn't be fair anyhow. The people with the biggest rigs and mining-farms would quickly consume the network, and the distribution would favor the few wealthy mega-miners. Most people don't even know how setup mining. People would also hoard their coins, making it impossible for others to get a piece of the cake.
It would simply and clearly be a waste of time and energy to do this, and for what purpose? We would have the same situation with the exception of that we could point to the mining history and say that it had a "fair launch"(only meaning that it was stable and predictable).

[qwizzie]

People complains about Dash, formerly Darkcoin, formerly Xcoin, being instamined and not rightfully propagated.
Well, I think there are some things that we need to reconsider before we actually come to this conclusion.

1. The history.

When Xcoin was launched, it had no other features that any other coin didn't have. It was a restart and a copy with no unique features. It was worthless, and it got distributed through an "instantaneous mining"(2.5m coins out of current 5.0m supply within 8 hours).

What these miners got is a humongous amount of Xcoin, which in itself was nothing but a copied coin. Lucky few, they probably had 100's of thousands of Xcoins, worth about 0.1btc/100,000 or something at that time.

One month later, actual progress had been made, and the coin attained a small value, the community voted to change the name to 'Darkcoin', because anonymity was the goal, and even though it wasn't fully implemented yet, people had started to believe in the development.

 
So now the coin was called Darkcoin. Progress was being made and 3 months later it was no longer the Xcoin that was once launched. Just as like a skyscraper that had started taking form, from just being an architecture with a lot of guesswork, now something actual had been created, and it was called Darkcoin. Still not fully anonymous, and lots of bugs left to be solved, but yet interesting enough to have caught a lot of attention.

Continued development brought stability to the coin, and it finally got to the point where the original goal of anonymity had been reached. But new opportunities had opened up, the masternode network turned out to bring a whole new platform to the market, so it was a given to continue expanding on it.

Yet again a community vote was made for changing the name from the somewhat obscure 'Darkcoin', to 'Dash'. Why was this appropriate? Because the development had reached far beyond Darkcoin, Darkcoin was the nymph that hatched into something much bigger and the incentives had changed.

The distribution is history, it's an integrated part of the project, and it laid the foundation for what we have now.

2. A relaunch is not an option.

Because if this were to be relaunched, it wouldn't be fair anyhow. The people with the biggest rigs and mining-farms would quickly consume the network, and the distribution would favor the few wealthy mega-miners. Most people don't even know how setup mining. People would also hoard their coins, making it impossible for others to get a piece of the cake.
It would simply and clearly be a waste of time and energy to do this, and for what purpose? We would have the same situation with the exception of that we could point to the mining history and say that it had a "fair launch"(only meaning that it was stable and predictable).

Interesting post and i agree with point 1 and 2.
I have no problems with Dash being called a scheme as the word scheme itself has several definitions...  
("scheme : a visionary project" comes to mind when i think of it)


 

[othe]

But it was all a planned for profit project which makes your argument invalid:

http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2013-December/003965.html

2013/12/29 Evan Duffield <eduffield82 at gmail.com>:
> Hello,
>
>
> We’re a startup looking for 1 or 2 really good C++ programmer that is
> familiar with the bitcoin internals to help with a for-profit startup.
>
>
> We will be able to provide more information about the project after signing
> a non-compete/non-disclosure agreement. Our coin will be one of the truly
> unique coins that are not just a clone of the original Bitcoin code. In
> short the project will be a merge-mined altcoin that will provide a very
> useful service to the whole crypto-coin ecosystem.
>
>
> If you have added any features to Bitcoin or related technologies this is a
> definite bonus. Please include information about the work you’re done in the
> space.
>
>
> We have detailed plans on how to implement it and the roles we are looking
> to fill. If interested please email eduffield82 at gmail.com with a description
> of your work experience and we’ll vett the applications and share our plans
> to see if you’re interested.
>
>
> Thanks,
>
>
> Evan & Kyle
>
> Hawk Financial Group, LLC

[dEBRUYNE]

Ahh, butthurt trolls missed the boat and want a restart Or maybe he was in at the start and sold out way too early and wants another go? There where hundreds of IPs mining as shown from the thread when folks where having trouble syncing, just like any other coin launch, miners jumping on low difficulty for fast profits but it gets brought up again and again and again by the same small group. There's a detailed analysis here if anyone really gives a shit:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.msg12689175#msg12689175

That doesn't say a thing, for all we know it could've been one entity spinning up multiple instances on AWS and Azure. You simply can't make that argument based on IPs alone.

[qwizzie]

i'm gonna post something in here that i recentely posted in the Dashtalk forum so everyone reading this knows the difference between Instamine (also called Fastmine) and Premine :

Premine : Coins were given out before mining started. That means basically in the genesis block a certain amount of coins were distributed to accounts when the chain started.
In PoS coins, this is typically a 100% premine as all the coins are created at block 0. An popular example of this is NXT.
credits : SomethingElse

Instamine / Fastmine : is different and also has a much broader definition. That is when a cryptocurrency in its early hours / days / period due to either accidental fastmining (Dash) or intentional crippling of mining software (Monero) or 1 person / group ending up with a large number of coins (Bitcoin / Satoshi 1 million BTC) delivers a lot of coins in a select few hands.

The whole cryptocurrency scene could be seen currently as an Instamine to the outside world as only a small percentage of the human population is aware of it .. although the high Bitcoin price in 2014 and the media hype that followed after that could have changed that by now.


 

[othe]

No and the list does have an awful lot of IPs in similar ranges but a hell of a lot more are entirely random and several folks who where mining from launch have said their IPs aren't on it so its not complete.

Which ip list? Oh, and no one mined it from the start as it didn´t compile and there where no win binaries either.

[dEBRUYNE]

i'm gonna post something in here that i recentely posted in the Dashtalk forum so everyone reading this knows the difference between of Instamine (also called Fastmine) and Premine :

Premine : Coins were given out before mining started. That means basically in the genesis block a certain amount of coins were distributed to accounts when the chain started.
In PoS coins, this is typically a 100% premine as all the coins are created at block 0. An popular example of this is NXT.
credits : SomethingElse

Instamine / Fastmine : is different and also has a much broader definition. That is when a cryptocurrency in its early hours / days / period due to either accidental fastmining (Dash) or intentional crippling of mining software (Monero) or 1 person / group ending up with a large number of coins (Bitcoin / Satoshi 1 million BTC) delivers a lot of coins in a select few hands.

The whole cryptocurrency scene could be seen currently as an Instamine to the largely unaware outside world as only a small percentage of the human population is aware of it .. although the high Bitcoin price in 2014 and the media hype that followed after that could have changed that by now.


 

First of all, Monero was forked from Bytecoin. Thus, it ended up with a crippled miner due to the forking, not in any way was it intentional. Also, the mining code was fixed within the week. Furthermore, Monero didn't deviate from its original schedule. That's the biggest difference here and you fail to comprehend that.

but I suspect the group running  their coin hold 99% of it and have no good intentions towards crypto.

@stan.distortion, could you elaborate on this? I am assuming you mean bytecoin or something?

Btw, I am not saying Evan + friends were the sole miners at the start. However, you can't counter that argument based on IPs alone.

[qwizzie]

i'm gonna post something in here that i recentely posted in the Dashtalk forum so everyone reading this knows the difference between of Instamine (also called Fastmine) and Premine :

Premine : Coins were given out before mining started. That means basically in the genesis block a certain amount of coins were distributed to accounts when the chain started.
In PoS coins, this is typically a 100% premine as all the coins are created at block 0. An popular example of this is NXT.
credits : SomethingElse

Instamine / Fastmine : is different and also has a much broader definition. That is when a cryptocurrency in its early hours / days / period due to either accidental fastmining (Dash) or intentional crippling of mining software (Monero) or 1 person / group ending up with a large number of coins (Bitcoin / Satoshi 1 million BTC) delivers a lot of coins in a select few hands.

The whole cryptocurrency scene could be seen currently as an Instamine to the largely unaware outside world as only a small percentage of the human population is aware of it .. although the high Bitcoin price in 2014 and the media hype that followed after that could have changed that by now.

First of all, Monero was forked from Bytecoin. Thus, it ended up with a crippled miner due to the forking, not in any way was it intentional. Also, the mining code was fixed within the week. Furthermore, Monero didn't deviate from their original schedule. That's the biggest difference here and you fail to comprehend that.

The crippled mining software details: http://da-data.blogspot.nl/2014/08/minting-money-with-monero-and-cpu.html

Fact is that Monero was instamined, period (intentional or not is actually irrelevant, it happened). It is therefore pure hypocrisy of Monero to keep throwing the instamine at Dash (which btw Dash fully acknowledge --> https://dashdot.io/alpha/?page_id=118) while Monero had a serious instamine problem through cripple mining software themself and they dont even acknowledge it.
If there is something i really loath, its hypocrisy.    

Fact is that with this broad definition of instamine a lot of cryptocurrencies fall under it, including Bitcoin, Monero and Dash.
So its really a useless and dumb argument to use against each other.

[binaryFate]

Fact is that Monero was instamined...

This is wrong, it never deviated from the planned schedule.

... period.

Nope, try again.

[smooth]

Fact is that with this broad definition of instamine a lot of cryptocurrencies fall under it, including Bitcoin, Monero and Dash.
So its really a useless and dumb argument to use against each other.

1. Monero and Bitcoin are off topic to this thread. Please try to stay on topic.

2. If the definition fits every coin (which any definition that equates to "unfair mining" certainly does) then it is a meaningless definition and should not be used. The correct definition of instamine is when a large to very large number of coins are mined at launch despite the planned and documented distribution schedule being much slower. (If planned and documented, a very fast distribution at launch is a fastmine not an instamine.) By this correct definition for example, Litecoin had a small instamine (around 1% of current coins). Bitcoin and Monero did not.

[qwizzie]

People complains about Dash, formerly Darkcoin, formerly Xcoin, being instamined and not rightfully propagated.
Well, I think there are some things that we need to reconsider before we actually come to this conclusion.

A) The history.

When Xcoin was launched, it had no other features that any other coin didn't have. It was a restart and a copy with no unique features. It was worthless, and it got distributed through an "instantaneous mining"(2.5m coins out of current 5.0m supply within 8 hours).

small correction : it was actually 1.99m not 2.5m --> https://dashdot.io/alpha/?page_id=118

[othe]

No and the list does have an awful lot of IPs in similar ranges but a hell of a lot more are entirely random and several folks who where mining from launch have said their IPs aren't on it so its not complete.

Which ip list? Oh, and no one mined it from the start as it didn´t compile and there where no win binaries either.

Maybe you couldn't compile it but that doesn't mean others couldn't, did you fix it yourself or wait for a download?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.msg4595573#msg4595573

EDIT:

...

but I suspect the group running  their coin hold 99% of it and have no good intentions towards crypto.

@stan.distortion, could you elaborate on this? I am assuming you mean bytecoin or something?
...

Add it up, you know the group I'm talking about and what have they actually done that benefits the space as a whole? Screwed around with markets? Started fights over development? Pitted alts against each other so neither advance? This lot are a cancer to crypto and it looks intentional, who has the most to gain from that?

After analysing your list, this is the result:

Code:

Cloud + dedicated servers
54.212.164.221 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.203.24.96 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.202.75.71 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.203.83.237 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.203.215.90 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.214.64.131 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.245.219.141 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.214.217.9 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.212.171.58 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.235.239.14 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.227.210.63 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.224.80.96 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.226.144.1 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.196.100.234 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.212.189.65 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.184.65.108 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.212.32.86 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.234.214.166 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.242.185.39 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.203.94.44 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
23.23.186.131 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.221.170.103 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.205.131.190 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.202.162.56 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.244.195.204 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.218.143.120 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
23.22.98.102 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
50.112.10.185 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
50.112.82.162 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.221.163.161 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.203.231.220 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.197.22.82 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.203.32.45 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.203.211.146 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
50.17.39.214 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.244.84.153 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
50.16.206.102 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.203.199.175 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.211.19.102 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.202.70.156 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.202.137.113 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.211.180.136 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
23.20.9.158 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.203.242.24 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.202.174.228 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
50.112.38.82 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
54.202.185.142 - Amazon Technologies Inc.
137.135.216.240 - Microsoft Corp
137.116.230.126 - Microsoft Corp
137.135.200.139 - Microsoft Corp
137.135.209.9 - Microsoft Corp
137.117.66.227 - Microsoft Corp
137.116.229.112 - Microsoft Corp
138.91.56.36 - Microsoft Corp
137.135.162.95 - Microsoft Corp
137.135.60.201 - Microsoft Corp
168.61.87.67 - Microsoft Corp
137.135.205.224 - Microsoft Corp
168.62.213.56 - Microsoft Corp
137.135.205.26 - Microsoft Corp
138.91.55.20 - Microsoft Corp
137.117.235.15 - Microsoft Corp
137.135.103.204 - Microsoft Corp
137.117.201.91 - Microsoft Corp
137.135.206.30 - Microsoft Corp
138.91.48.240 - Microsoft Corp
137.117.138.79 - Microsoft Corp
137.135.1.82 - Microsoft Corp
168.61.36.106 - Microsoft Corp
168.63.66.51 - Microsoft Corp
137.135.209.167 - Microsoft Corp
138.91.49.237 - Microsoft Corp
168.61.85.13 - Microsoft Corp
138.91.116.136 - Microsoft Corp
168.63.203.210 - Microsoft Corp
137.135.207.116 - Microsoft Corp
168.63.203.214 - Microsoft Corp
138.91.54.226 - Microsoft Corp
137.135.209.195 - Microsoft Corp
137.135.200.14 - Microsoft Corp
138.91.54.22 - Microsoft Corp
137.135.60.190 - Microsoft Corp
137.116.231.53 - Microsoft Corp
137.135.207.218 - Microsoft Corp
137.135.204.129 - Microsoft Corp
168.61.84.37 - Microsoft Corp
138.91.48.137 - Microsoft Corp
137.135.1.60 - Microsoft Corp
137.135.207.139 - Microsoft Corp
138.91.56.10 - Microsoft Corp
137.135.202.79 - Microsoft Corp
138.91.54.194 - Microsoft Corp
137.135.208.52 - Microsoft Corp
138.91.53.228 - Microsoft Corp
138.91.48.42 - Microsoft Corp
138.91.50.152 - Microsoft Corp
65.52.120.165 - Microsoft Corp
65.52.119.150 - Microsoft Corp
65.52.120.174 - Microsoft Corp
23.99.20.89 - Microsoft Corp
23.99.20.99 - Microsoft Corp
191.234.40.164 - Microsoft Corp
191.235.131.174 - Microsoft Corp
191.234.40.58 - Microsoft Corp
191.234.34.136 - Microsoft Corp
191.234.33.235 - Microsoft Corp
192.99.10.172 - OVH Hosting -  Inc.
199.48.164.198 - Nodes Direct
144.76.45.199 - Server Block
172.245.208.234 - VPS ACE
46.183.216.84 - Dedicated servers
212.7.200.8 - Dediserv Dedicated Servers Sp. z o.o.
162.243.33.16 - "Digital Ocean -  Inc."
5.9.146.74 - Hetzner Online AG
62.210.177.2 - IP Pool for Iliad-Entreprises Business Hosting Customers


Private:
86.4.102.125 - NTL Infrastructure - Nottingham
83.248.99.134 - Com Hem customer broadband access
183.111.10.26 - Korea Telecom
81.190.117.6 - Multimedia Polska S. A.
114.79.36.226 - PT SMART TELECOM
191.234.34.86 - Unknown
89.134.172.182 - UPC Magyarorszag Kft.
24.56.43.184 - Cox Communications
98.165.130.67 - Cox Communications

From the 124 IPs you gave me 115 where Cloudhosting and Dedicated Servers, 9 of them seem to be private/users.

106 of them alone where at Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure cloud instances.


Edit, moved cox com to privatelist.

[smooth]

People complains about Dash, formerly Darkcoin, formerly Xcoin, being instamined and not rightfully propagated.
Well, I think there are some things that we need to reconsider before we actually come to this conclusion.

A) The history.

When Xcoin was launched, it had no other features that any other coin didn't have. It was a restart and a copy with no unique features. It was worthless, and it got distributed through an "instantaneous mining"(2.5m coins out of current 5.0m supply within 8 hours).

small correction : it was actually 1.99m not 2.5m --> https://dashdot.io/alpha/?page_id=118

Yes that is correct. The last block with extra coins was 4500, with 1.99m+ outstanding. If you click forward to the next block you will see it drops from 500 to 25 coins.

https://chainz.cryptoid.info/dash/block.dws?4500.htm

[smoothie]

...

And that's not a complete list, doesn't getpeerinfo order by latency?

Oh so now it isn't a complete list once it is shown that many of those ips are VPS instances?

Looks like maybe 10 different people mining on that list ("dashers").

Evan said there were "hundreds" of miners.

[smoothie]

People complains about Dash, formerly Darkcoin, formerly Xcoin, being instamined and not rightfully propagated.
Well, I think there are some things that we need to reconsider before we actually come to this conclusion.

A) The history.

When Xcoin was launched, it had no other features that any other coin didn't have. It was a restart and a copy with no unique features. It was worthless, and it got distributed through an "instantaneous mining"(2.5m coins out of current 5.0m supply within 8 hours).

small correction : it was actually 1.99m not 2.5m --> https://dashdot.io/alpha/?page_id=118

Yes that is correct. The last block with extra coins was 4500, with 1.99m+ outstanding. If you click forward to the next block you will see it drops from 500 to 25 coins.

https://chainz.cryptoid.info/dash/block.dws?4500.htm

Much of this still reminds me of how Solidcoin dev Realsolid/Coinhunter changed the emission to drop the rewards per block of solidcoin. Went from like 50 to 5 or so.

[qwizzie]

People complains about Dash, formerly Darkcoin, formerly Xcoin, being instamined and not rightfully propagated.
Well, I think there are some things that we need to reconsider before we actually come to this conclusion.

A) The history.

When Xcoin was launched, it had no other features that any other coin didn't have. It was a restart and a copy with no unique features. It was worthless, and it got distributed through an "instantaneous mining"(2.5m coins out of current 5.0m supply within 8 hours).

small correction : it was actually 1.99m not 2.5m --> https://dashdot.io/alpha/?page_id=118

Yes that is correct. The last block with extra coins was 4500, with 1.99m+ outstanding. If you click forward to the next block you will see it drops from 500 to 25 coins.

https://chainz.cryptoid.info/dash/block.dws?4500.htm

Much of this still reminds me of how Solidcoin dev Realsolid/Coinhunter changed the emission to drop the rewards per block of solidcoin. Went from like 50 to 5 or so.

please stay on topic

we are discussing Dash not solidcoin

(thanks smooth  )

[wopakee]

People complains about Dash, formerly Darkcoin, formerly Xcoin, being instamined and not rightfully propagated.
Well, I think there are some things that we need to reconsider before we actually come to this conclusion.

A) The history.

When Xcoin was launched, it had no other features that any other coin didn't have. It was a restart and a copy with no unique features. It was worthless, and it got distributed through an "instantaneous mining"(2.5m coins out of current 5.0m supply within 8 hours).

small correction : it was actually 1.99m not 2.5m --> https://dashdot.io/alpha/?page_id=118

Corrected.

[qwizzie]

People complains about Dash, formerly Darkcoin, formerly Xcoin, being instamined and not rightfully propagated.
Well, I think there are some things that we need to reconsider before we actually come to this conclusion.

A) The history.

When Xcoin was launched, it had no other features that any other coin didn't have. It was a restart and a copy with no unique features. It was worthless, and it got distributed through an "instantaneous mining"(2.5m coins out of current 5.0m supply within 8 hours).

small correction : it was actually 1.99m not 2.5m --> https://dashdot.io/alpha/?page_id=118

Corrected.

thanks

[smooth]

...

And that's not a complete list, doesn't getpeerinfo order by latency?

Anyone with very high latency would have virtually no chance to have their block survive without being orphaned, given the high rate that blocks were being produced by powerful servers in extremely well connected data centers. Some probably did, but it would have to be negligible.

[americanpegasus]

Fine, Monero might be off topic, but I have to correct this one incorrect thing being said: in no way can someone reasonably say that having crippled mining software at launch was unfair (or an instamined) for Monero.  If anything, that actually made it more fair because those who got there first got fewer, not more, coins.