[ANN][DASH] Dash (dash.org) | First Self-Funding Self-Governing Crypto Currency

[smooth]

https://blockchain.info/charts/transaction-fees?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

That's BTC/day in fees... considering that the network is designed to replace BTC subsidy with fees, and given that almost 75% of the monetary base has been distributed, fees are way behind compared to what they should be to keep the network sustainable after the halvings.

It is designed to replace BTC subsidy with fees at some unspecified time, probably in the reasonably-distant future when BTC subsidy is much smaller than it is today. There is zero evidence it was ever designed to replace for example 3600 BTC/day in subsidy.

This can only be a gradual process / not an on-off switch where fees suddenly spike upwards 100x....

Yes but your comment that fees need to rise (as denominated in BTC) is not supported by any evidence, including the chart you linked.

I don't follow... What evidence do you need? That's the design of BTC: Fees have to take over from subsidy. It is a known element of how it works.

Yes, but that does not mean that fees have to increase.

Where is your evidence that fees have to increase?

There is a glide path in place in reducing subsidy so that fee increases don't go from zero to max overnight when coin distribution is (practically) over.

Nearly over? I don't think so. We've had a grand total of one halving. On this chart we are in reward era 2 out of 34.

If the designer of the system felt that subsidy must be replaced at an end point, and only then, there would be no glide path in diminishing subsidy. Emission would be flat, at a certain rate, until the last coins are issued.

Do you understand that wallet software and even user education, are part of the system?

If you take the broader view, how about taking an even broader view:

Do you understand that trial and error represent a lesson in user education?

Every user at some point will have a moment where his tx takes a long time because he forgot to pay fees, clicked the "send as zero fee if possible" etc etc. That's the moment when he learned why fees are useful. That's part of his learning.

And maybe they learn that Bitcoin is a pain in the ass, is unreliable and complicated, and go elsewhere.

I'm not saying that the system has failed or that it will definitely fail. I'm saying that it is starting to fail right now, because there is a mismatch between the infrastructure and user-education requirements of the system and its ability to function effectively. That is absolutely the case. At best it is poor planning and deployment.

0.0001/KB = 0.01$ for a 250b tx. It's an extremely low fee and there is no way to spin it around that it isn't.

Actually the very common rule is to set the fee at 0.0001 per any part of a KB. You can see this easily by looking at a block explorer and seeing how many of the transactions have fees of 0.0001, 0.0002, etc.

0.0001 BTC is around 0.04 USD. Whether that is tiny in absolute terms or not is somewhat subjective, but the fact remains that it is not tiny relative to established practice over the past few years (as I said that was consistently a high priority rate until very recently) and for that reason lot of very widely deployed infrastructure is now failing.

[eduffield]

And maybe they learn that Bitcoin is a pain in the ass, is unreliable and complicated, and go elsewhere.

I'm not saying that the system has failed or that it will definitely fail. I'm saying that it is starting to fail right now, because there is a mismatch between the infrastructure and user-education requirements of the system and its ability to function effectively. That is absolutely the case. At best it is poor planning and deployment.

Bitcoin needs to just accept it can't grow fast enough to do everything for everyone in the entire ecosystem. Satoshi said it was suppose to be a type of Digital Gold, maybe we need to go back to that way of thinking. That's a great accomplishment... but, when you have gold, you don't move it around all of the time. Why can't Bitcoin handle the larger value transactions in the space and all of the alts can handle the smaller day-to-day transactions.

The ecosystem is already setup to scale to infinity. Everyone wins.

[smooth]

And maybe they learn that Bitcoin is a pain in the ass, is unreliable and complicated, and go elsewhere.

I'm not saying that the system has failed or that it will definitely fail. I'm saying that it is starting to fail right now, because there is a mismatch between the infrastructure and user-education requirements of the system and its ability to function effectively. That is absolutely the case. At best it is poor planning and deployment.

Bitcoin needs to just accept it can't grow fast enough to do everything for everyone in the entire ecosystem. Satoshi said it was suppose to be a type of Digital Gold, maybe we need to go back to that way of thinking. That's a great accomplishment... but, when you have gold, you don't move it around all of the time. Why can't Bitcoin handle the larger value transactions in the space and all of the alts can handle the smaller day-to-day transactions.

The ecosystem is already setup to scale to infinity. Everyone wins.

It could, but it is currently out of step with that vision. SPV wallets were built up (in part by Satoshi, by the way) as a way to make the system easily accessible to people making routine transactions including buying coffee and using vending machines (plus many others of course). So you have have many end users doing exactly that, having adopted Bitcoin as a transactional medium, not something limited to high powered bankers and cryptocurrency experts. Perhaps that was a bad idea, but it's too late to erase that from history.

That worked just fine until very recently, and now you still have those users trying to transact but without the tools to do so effectively. Even if one fully buys in to your Evolution concept (as one example of several), and believes that Evolution is the way that the ecosystem will scale to infinity, Evolution isn't here. Even Bitcoin wallets with the ability to effectively set fees and increase fees if needed after the fact don't exist in any widely-deployed form.

So the whole thing is quite a mess right now. In the future I have no doubt it will get better, but where we are today is not pretty. Either an earlier and more effective push should have been made to get the tools out there faster to manage block space scarcity and shift transactions off the Bitcoin main chain, or there should have been some sort of block size increase to buy the time that is needed. Having done neither is an objectively poor outcome, and therefore one must fairly rate the process of having reached this outcome as ineffective.

EDIT: BTW, Satoshi never said that Bitcoin was supposed to be digital gold (that description was invented later by others). His only mention of gold in the white paper related to the steady release of new coins, and in an email he compared Bitcoin to "base metal as scarce as gold" that could be sent over the internet. It is very clear he intended it to be for end-user payments. Opinions differ over whether that vision has turned out to be impractical or Bitcoin has been hijacked by people who want to develop it in a different direction.

[tungfa]

The Future of Cash vs. The Future of Money
 

http://dcebrief.com/the-future-of-cash-vs-the-future-of-money/

[TaoOfSaatoshi]

https://twitter.com/TaoOfSatoshi/status/705000060669534209?s=09

[toknormal]

https://twitter.com/TaoOfSatoshi/status/705000060669534209?s=09

LoL. Hilarious.

[dafdaf]

Still trading on Poloniex?

Well, yes, for the time being. Tried Exmo but the non-zoomable charts (among other things) are annoying. And is there a trade analysis tools like Poloniex?

[TanteStefana2]

an interesting poll from Juan S Galt : https://dashtalk.org/threads/budget-proposal-peter-todd-to-review-instant-x.8186/

edit : that should make certain trolls either very nervous or very happy or both 

I love Toknormal's idea of getting some PHD students or Academes to do this.

[AforAmethyst]

The Future of Cash vs. The Future of Money
 

http://dcebrief.com/the-future-of-cash-vs-the-future-of-money/

A timely reminder that there is still a role for cash with Dash. We are being pushed towards bankster digital payments. The refugees in the migrant crisis are not given cash. They are given credits. These credits are the trainining ground for a cashless society. bankster digital cards could be turned off anytime during a crisis.

[TanteStefana2]

It really looks like it's finally happening. We are going to start getting the overflow of crypto traffic.

GMaxwell says it's a non-event:

None of this is especially interesting: one should always assume that the number of transactions at a fee of 0 is effectively infinite.

The spammers moved to paying more than 1e-8 BTC per byte; which is still much lower than most ordinary transactions; but high enough to move the needle on tradeblock... this lets people spin a bunch of FUD.  Meanwhile for most people transactions continue to function like normal: a total non-event.

This is an interesting contrast of views. Maxwell sees the low fee transactions as kind of "invisible" background, not much different from empty block space because that space is always available to a higher fee transaction. Fair enough, he has a point there, but I just see that leading to a bidding war that ends up in commercial monopolies and tiered access.

I'm not sure if the Transmission Control Protocol that the internet runs on works like this - I thought it just worked on a first come first served basis, but I may be wrong.

This is why I see a diversity of technologies emerging in cryptocurrencies, not just one.

Yah but, really, you need a fee to keep from sybil attacks.  Like he said, 0 transaction fees are limitless, anyone can spam with them and not lose anything.  The fees make it harder to spam, and impossible to really do harm.

However, if they can't expand fast enough and transaction fees for people that really need to move their money becomes the same as using fiat, we lose the advantage.  Also, at that point, only a few could afford to move their coins.  But I think they have time there.  Just not a lot of it.

[Honest Tim]

The Future of Cash vs. The Future of Money
 

http://dcebrief.com/the-future-of-cash-vs-the-future-of-money/

A timely reminder that there is still a role for cash with Dash. We are being pushed towards bankster digital payments. The refugees in the migrant crisis are not given cash. They are given credits. These credits are the trainining ground for a cashless society. bankster digital cards could be turned off anytime during a crisis.

FTFY. 

[AforAmethyst]

https://blockchain.info/charts/transaction-fees?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

That's BTC/day in fees... considering that the network is designed to replace BTC subsidy with fees, and given that almost 75% of the monetary base has been distributed, fees are way behind compared to what they should be to keep the network sustainable after the halvings.

It is designed to replace BTC subsidy with fees at some unspecified time, probably in the reasonably-distant future when BTC subsidy is much smaller than it is today. There is zero evidence it was ever designed to replace for example 3600 BTC/day in subsidy.

I had a 24 hour confirm receiving a transaction that was sent by another ordinary user (with a fee that would under previously-normal conditions nearly-always result in 1st- or 2nd-block confirmation), and that placed me in a position of providing poor service to my customer by waiting a lot time to deliver, or assume the risk of transaction reversal. From my perspective as an ordinary user, Bitcoin is starting to fail as a transactional medium.

If you are right and Bitcoin eventually loses its use as a transactional medium, does it still have a role as a store of value? I think that would rapidly go too unless the blockchain issues are solved quickly. Are Dash and other similar cryptos ready to step into Bitcoin's shoes? Could they cope with the volume should Bitcoin crash?

[AforAmethyst]

The Future of Cash vs. The Future of Money
 

http://dcebrief.com/the-future-of-cash-vs-the-future-of-money/

A timely reminder that there is still a role for cash with Dash. We are being pushed towards bankster digital payments. The refugees in the migrant crisis are not given cash. They are given credits. These credits are the trainining ground for a cashless society. bankster digital cards could be turned off anytime during a crisis.

FTFY. 

  Yes. Quite right.

[ddink7]

It really looks like it's finally happening. We are going to start getting the overflow of crypto traffic.

GMaxwell says it's a non-event:

None of this is especially interesting: one should always assume that the number of transactions at a fee of 0 is effectively infinite.

The spammers moved to paying more than 1e-8 BTC per byte; which is still much lower than most ordinary transactions; but high enough to move the needle on tradeblock... this lets people spin a bunch of FUD.  Meanwhile for most people transactions continue to function like normal: a total non-event.

This is an interesting contrast of views. Maxwell sees the low fee transactions as kind of "invisible" background, not much different from empty block space because that space is always available to a higher fee transaction. Fair enough, he has a point there, but I just see that leading to a bidding war that ends up in commercial monopolies and tiered access.

I'm not sure if the Transmission Control Protocol that the internet runs on works like this - I thought it just worked on a first come first served basis, but I may be wrong.

This is why I see a diversity of technologies emerging in cryptocurrencies, not just one.

Question: While I agree with GMaxwell in principle, that free transactions are simply an open invitation to Sybil attack and consequently can be disregarded entirely, doesn't that backlog of transactions still eventually risk clogging the mempool and crashing the miners?

From the perspective of Bitcoin's "legitimate" transaction capacity, he's right. The current backlog is irrelevant from that point of view, because the legit (fee paying) transactions are still getting through. But what if these 0-fee transactions end up filling up the mempool and crashing a large number of miners/nodes?

In my opinion, the risk isn't that a legitimate transaction won't go through for three days (five or ten cents will generally get it in a block right away). My concern is that if enough miners crash, it could create big problems!

[TanteStefana2]

https://blockchain.info/charts/transaction-fees?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

That's BTC/day in fees... considering that the network is designed to replace BTC subsidy with fees, and given that almost 75% of the monetary base has been distributed, fees are way behind compared to what they should be to keep the network sustainable after the halvings.

It is designed to replace BTC subsidy with fees at some unspecified time, probably in the reasonably-distant future when BTC subsidy is much smaller than it is today. There is zero evidence it was ever designed to replace for example 3600 BTC/day in subsidy.

I had a 24 hour confirm receiving a transaction that was sent by another ordinary user (with a fee that would under previously-normal conditions nearly-always result in 1st- or 2nd-block confirmation), and that placed me in a position of providing poor service to my customer by waiting a lot time to deliver, or assume the risk of transaction reversal. From my perspective as an ordinary user, Bitcoin is starting to fail as a transactional medium.

If you are right and Bitcoin eventually loses its use as a transactional medium, does it still have a role as a store of value? I think that would rapidly go too unless the blockchain issues are solved quickly. Are Dash and other similar cryptos ready to step into Bitcoin's shoes? Could they cope with the volume should Bitcoin crash?

In my opinion, which, granted, isn't worth much, yes, Bitcoin has the highest marketcap by far, and because of that, it can handle very large transactions.  Still, not large enough though.  But the way I see it, Bitcoin will be the way to transfer large sums of value back and forth.  That's why I think it will become the tool for Banks.  Even so they're coming up with their own "blockchains" they can't secure them in such a way as to be trustless / or trusted by all parties.  Unfortunately for them, Bitcoin is still too small.  It has to grow more.  And that growth has to be organic.  They can't just pump a bunch of fiat into the system, because that would only make it more volatile.  So it's sort of a waiting game  And it's being managed by those who see this, IMO, as the future of Bitcoin.

[TanteStefana2]

Question: While I agree with GMaxwell in principle, that free transactions are simply an open invitation to Sybil attack and consequently can be disregarded entirely, doesn't that backlog of transactions still eventually risk clogging the mempool and crashing the miners?

From the perspective of Bitcoin's "legitimate" transaction capacity, he's right. The current backlog is irrelevant from that point of view, because the legit (fee paying) transactions are still getting through. But what if these 0-fee transactions end up filling up the mempool and crashing a large number of miners/nodes?

In my opinion, the risk isn't that a legitimate transaction won't go through for three days (five or ten cents will generally get it in a block right away). My concern is that if enough miners crash, it could create big problems!

Oh, I didn't realize that could happen.  In that case, they (and maybe we) should put in a kick back system where, if your transaction isn't likely to be included in the blockchain in the next X hours, it gets canceled.

[eduffield]

And maybe they learn that Bitcoin is a pain in the ass, is unreliable and complicated, and go elsewhere.

I'm not saying that the system has failed or that it will definitely fail. I'm saying that it is starting to fail right now, because there is a mismatch between the infrastructure and user-education requirements of the system and its ability to function effectively. That is absolutely the case. At best it is poor planning and deployment.

Bitcoin needs to just accept it can't grow fast enough to do everything for everyone in the entire ecosystem. Satoshi said it was suppose to be a type of Digital Gold, maybe we need to go back to that way of thinking. That's a great accomplishment... but, when you have gold, you don't move it around all of the time. Why can't Bitcoin handle the larger value transactions in the space and all of the alts can handle the smaller day-to-day transactions.

The ecosystem is already setup to scale to infinity. Everyone wins.

It could, but it is currently out of step with that vision. SPV wallets were built up (in part by Satoshi, by the way) as a way to make the system easily accessible to people making routine transactions including buying coffee and using vending machines (plus many others of course). So you have have many end users doing exactly that, having adopted Bitcoin as a transactional medium, not something limited to high powered bankers and cryptocurrency experts. Perhaps that was a bad idea, but it's too late to erase that from history.

That worked just fine until very recently, and now you still have those users trying to transact but without the tools to do so effectively. Even if one fully buys in to your Evolution concept (as one example of several), and believes that Evolution is the way that the ecosystem will scale to infinity, Evolution isn't here. Even Bitcoin wallets with the ability to effectively set fees and increase fees if needed after the fact don't exist in any widely-deployed form.

So the whole thing is quite a mess right now. In the future I have no doubt it will get better, but where we are today is not pretty. Either an earlier and more effective push should have been made to get the tools out there faster to manage block space scarcity and shift transactions off the Bitcoin main chain, or there should have been some sort of block size increase to buy the time that is needed. Having done neither is an objectively poor outcome, and therefore one must fairly rate the process of having reached this outcome as ineffective.

EDIT: BTW, Satoshi never said that Bitcoin was supposed to be digital gold (that description was invented later by others). His only mention of gold in the white paper related to the steady release of new coins, and in an email he compared Bitcoin to "base metal as scarce as gold" that could be sent over the internet. It is very clear he intended it to be for end-user payments. Opinions differ over whether that vision has turned out to be impractical or Bitcoin has been hijacked by people who want to develop it in a different direction.

I actually don't think there's anything wrong with SPV or the current state of the ecosystem (minus some centralization concerns, but that's for another time)! How many transactions could the current ecosystem handle if we utilized every blockchain at once. This is going to be much easier to explain if we start using daily throughput instead of MB per block, which is a terrible metric.

Here's the currently limit and percentage full:

Name           Throughput per day           Percentage Full
Bitcoin         144MB                              95-100%
Etherium      ?                                      <%
Litecoin        576MB                              <1%    
Dash            576MB                              <1%
Dogecoin      576MB                              <1%
Monero         No Limit                            ~


I just looked at the last few blocks for each of these and we all basically have very low usage. How big can we scale, if the Bitcoin ecosystem were inclusive rather than trying to keep everything to itself? All they have to do is add the rest of the main alternative coins to all of the main sites like  Bitstamp, Coinbase, Bitpay, etc. That would allow the free flow of money through the entire ecosystem then, we wouldn't be in this situation at all. The theoretical limitation of the current ecosystem is at least 100-1000x that of the Bitcoin blockchain at this point and it will expand much faster and deal with the exponential growth much better than they will because they're a million programmers out here just waiting for the opportunity.

As for "Digital Gold", he didn't coin the phrase, but he set the expectation that it works like gold:  "The steady addition of a constant of amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expending resources to add gold to circulation". I think it's time we stop messing with Bitcoin and let it become the protocol for the entire space. We have a good foundation to grow on and the rest of the space just needs to take over development into the million directions we need to go in-order to bring products to users. One product per blockchain, this is the new type of entity the space created... it's a DAC!

So each of these are DACS... right? Bitcoin, Etherium, Litcoin, Dash, Dogecoin, Monero, etc. They are decentralized, organized and each offer some sort of service to users that you can't get in the Bitcoin space. So if someone needs to some completely anonymous transactions they would use Dash, Monero, etc (and who cares which, there's trillions of dollars out there to bring in). If someone wanted to make a contract they use Etherium, if you want to record something on the blockchain... use Factom. We should have competitors, offering the same services too, those are like two competing companies.

I want to see products coming out for using all of this technology, like for example... you could make an amazon AWS by forking Dash and using the masternode system to host VPS sessions. Then you use a brand new token for paying for the service. If you have Dogecoins and want to buy six months VPS time on this network, you could use something like Shapeshift.io to pay from one to the other. I think we're see the birth of this new economic system and it doesn't support this idea of Bitcoin having to do everything. They already did what they were support to do, they created the crypto reserve currency.  

Also, we need to start realizing the economic implications of Bitcoin hegemony. There's only four possible outcomes of playing this game with the ecosystem and they are eventually going to lose. They can't do everything, might as well accept it. There's also only one way everyone wins, it's to be inclusive.  



Also, how does each of these scale. Lets assume "Bitcoin Scaling" means 40x throughput and allowing the alt market to grow means 100x scaling ability. (Rough estimates)



We want the one where, there is no limitation to the amount of money that can come into the space and be used for all sorts of things. We don't want imaginary limitations, which is what we currently have. How do we fix this?

[toknormal]

if the Bitcoin ecosystem were inclusive rather than trying to keep everything to itself?....Also, we need to start realizing the economic implications of Bitcoin hegemony. There's only four possible outcomes of playing this game with the ecosystem and they are eventually going to lose. They can't do everything, might as well accept it. There's also only one way everyone wins, it's to be inclusive.

Amen to that !!

I said as much right here.

[TanteStefana2]

Agreed, thanks Evan for the graphics and Tok for your explanations and insights  

[qwizzie]

its like a certain calmness has landed on this forum, the last 4 / 5 pages had some really interesting discussions
and even smooth's participation was interesting to follow..



if this continues i may even have to adjust my signature