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

[qwizzie]

I'm looking for a few pioneering masternode owners, interested in setting up some masternodes (7 to be exact) in the Trappist-1 dwarfstar system.
Interested party's can register at the NYTimes : https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/science/trappist-1-exoplanets-nasa.html?_r=0

There is some urgency to this as i fear other cryptocurrencies are planning to do the same thing, but if we all act fast and unified we should beat them all.
Knowledge of FTL drives and Interstellar Relay technology is preferred.

Lets make Dash interstellar useable !

[qwizzie]

oh oh      

http://www.coindesk.com/danish-police-claim-breakthrough-bitcoin-tracking/

I just want to say to the Danish people using Bitcoin and possibly feeling invaded on their privacy :

[afbitcoins]

Just been hanging out on the XMR speculation thread. Icey was bragging about to 'start' trolling us 'at the protocol level' (although he's hastily deleted that comment now I notice).

edit: although I did grab this snippet, apologies for quoting him, will try not to do it again.

Stack those together and add a Dash of secret sauce, then we start trolling them at the protocol level....  <evil grin>

What a classic moneron he is!

[bigrcanada1]

Just been hanging out on the XMR speculation thread. Icey was bragging about to 'start' trolling us 'at the protocol level' (although he's hastily deleted that comment now I notice).

edit: although I did grab this snippet, apologies for quoting him, will try not to do it again.

Stack those together and add a Dash of secret sauce, then we start trolling them at the protocol level....  <evil grin>

What a classic moneron he is!

What filthy scum bag ...

[iCEBREAKER]

Just been hanging out on the XMR speculation thread. Icey was bragging about to 'start' trolling us 'at the protocol level' (although he's hastily deleted that comment now I notice).

edit: although I did grab this snippet, apologies for quoting him, will try not to do it again.

Stack those together and add a Dash of secret sauce, then we start trolling them at the protocol level....  <evil grin>

Do you not even know how to use an internet forum?  My post is still right where I left it.   

I didn't delete that post, "hastily" (LOL try harder putz!) or otherwise.

Here is your snippet in context:

The XMR vs DASH meme only benefits DASH at this point.

You are internalizing the DashHole's "The XMR vs DASH meme only benefits DASH at this point" meme used to deflect criticism and discourage whistleblowing regarding their instamined scamcoin.

Paraphrased:

"The Bitcoin vs OneCoin meme only benefits OneCoin at this point."

There is no need to concede the (asinine) DashHole belief that all criticism and condemnation of their coin is necessarily motivated by the desire to pump another.

If you see fraud and don't cry fraud you are a fraud.

This hippy "we need to all hold hands & get along" attitude only works in the absence of broken designs & of scams (intended or otherwise).

We're not going to stop shining the light on those cockroaches simply because a little pump makes some nervous Nellies fretful and FOMO'd.   

In fact, the light is about to get brighter. 

PseudoNode is being forked into PseudoMasternode.

The discovery Dash relies on Proof of Ping is being used to create Lazy Masternodes.

Stack those together and add a Dash of secret sauce, then we start trolling them at the protocol level....  <evil grin>

[Lebubar]

                           ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[baddw]

YYou can't punish people for not voting, that's undemocratic. The addition of the abstain option in 12.1 helps some with this, but really, if I don't care one way or another about a proposal I am not gonna open my wallet to vote abstain, when I could just not vote. Even if I think a proposal is the greatest thing ever, if it's obviously going to pass with an overwhelming YES - No ratio, why would I vote? If you are holding on to $20k USD worth of an asset, you better damn well get to decide if you want to vote or not along with how you vote.

LOL "undemocratic" when voting is limited to a special elite few rich people who already earn interest on their holdings?  I mean really, listen to yourself.  Are you trying to promote Dash, or turn people away?  Please, my lord, allow this humble servant into your estate!

Personally I think that a MN that doesn't vote in a timely manner should be put to the back of the line of MN earnings.  That being said, if the voting system as described truly only gives 2 or 3 days to vote, I think that needs to be changed, and that proposals should be able to carry on through to the next month (or perhaps the system revamped, so that a proposal always has 1 full month to be voted on, on a rolling basis instead of having voting end on a calendar month).  Giving people a 2-3 day window to evaluate a proposal and vote on it is clearly a bit burdensome, and I wouldn't support a punishment for not voting if the short window persists.

On the larger problem, I'm not really talking about an "attacker" taking over the system but more like the kind of cronyism that is easily pervasive and hard to detect.  Let's retain a law firm... the attorney just happens to be my cousin.  Let's get some marketing material.... the artist just happens to be my college roommate's wife.  I'm not saying that it's vulnerable to attacks by bad actors; I'm saying that there is a pretty obvious way that this power could be abused in a banal manner by the inner circle of MN owners, not in a way that would destroy the system, but in a way that could over time destroy faith in the system.  And the inner circle needs to do everything possible to make clear any possible conflict of interests and abstain from any vote, or from proposing anything, that could possibly taint things in the eyes of the public.  The "Instamine" meme has lasted long enough, and the creation of MNs and diversion of half of the mining proceeds to MN owners only cements the perception of Darkcoin/Dash as a simple Creator-Enrichment-Machine.  

Taking salaries and such, well, how far do you guys really want to carry this?  Again, I believe that Evan is talanted, and that the development of Dash shows promise.  I like the ideas there.  But if you really want to break that negative perception, the major owners and development team need to go above and beyond in terms of disclosing things.  I would even go so far as disclosing all of Evan's (and the other core developers / anybody on salary) MNs, with some kind of a promise of locking up a certain percentage of funds long-term a la Satoshi Nakamoto.  If Satoshi ever moved his coins, it would have a seismic effect on the price of Bitcoin.  If Evan / Devs moved their large Dash holdings, it would have a similar effect.  They have to realize this.  Some kind of publication and commitment to lock up their coins for a long period (5 years?  10 years?) could only have a positive effect.

[baddw]

Thank you all for the replies.  It is reassuring that the voting mechanism actually requires something like 55% of the MNs vote.  That is far, far better than the 10% that the Wiki used to say.  I'm not 100% sure that that's the best method of voting, but it's within the realm of reason, and up for rational debate.  10% would not be.

I would recommend putting a lot of effort into cleaning up misleading statements like that on the Wiki, because naive people like me, who don't want to dig through 6,000 pages of forum posts, will simply read the Wiki and make up their minds.

I still believe that Dash is a good coin, and I love that it is being very actively developed and moved in new directions, rather than sitting stagnant and never changing anything, like the majority of coins out there.  This is what originally drew me to Dark, and it will keep me interested in Dash.

As for the Rinse and Repeat cycle of the prices, well, I've put my money where my mouth is.  I sold a little over 4BTC worth of DASH at .0209.  You can look back over the past two YEARS and see that the price has never topped the BTC ATH of around .026; and usually the top is in around .024.  This time we didn't even reach .023 before retreating back below .02.  That set in my mind that we would not be reaching a new ATH in BTC terms.

Looking at the price of Dash in terms of fiat like USD is silliness.  Ok, so it's $20.  You think if BTC had stayed at $500, that Dash would have risen on its own to $20 (.040 BTC)?  Seriously, it's been rangebound (in BTC terms) this whole time.  I've watched it from the sidelines for 2 years now, held by the same FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) that affects some of you.  Each time I think "But what if this is the time when it busts out to .03?"  But it never has.  I'm not saying it never will, but I believe that this isn't that time, and as I said before, I put my money where my mouth is and sold the vast majority of my Dash. Time will tell who is right.

I apologize for the "misleading" statement on the wiki, and I would definitely welcome any assistance you can provide in "cleaning it up." However, when I wrote that particular page, my intention was to give an overview of the budget system to a complete newbie who has no idea how it works. There is a real danger in getting too technical (have you ever wondered about a technical question, searched Wikipedia, and ended up with glazed-over eyes and absolutely no understanding of the subject?)

I mean, if we want to get technical about it, the budget system doesn't allocate block rewards 45%/45%/10% like most people think. The 10% that's withheld for the budget system is actually hardcoded to the minimum block reward. If hash power is low, DGW adjusts the difficulty, and block reward goes up. It's possible for the block reward, for instance, to be 5 DASH. Yet only 0.388 DASH will be allocated to the budget system, for instance. (At least that's my understanding of how things worked before 12.1). Also, fees are split 50/50 between miners and masternodes, not 45/45/10 as one might assume. But for somebody new to Dash (my target audience) I think that's only going to confuse them, and I doubt they really care.

P.S. If you really believe we are ratio-bound and won't exceed 0.02 BTC/DASH, why invest in DASH? Why not just invest in Bitcoin, then?

Wow you're pretty good at this straw man argument thing, not to mention also being thin-skinned. 

There is a difference between avoiding getting too technical and just plain being inaccurate.  The original Wiki quote was "If that proposal is approved by at least 10% of the masternode network".  This has a clear and unambiguous meaning to any native speaker of English -- meaning that only 10% of MN owners need to vote Yes, and the other 90% could vote No but it would still pass.  This is clearly wrong.  If you want to keep it non-technical, you would only have to fix one thing: change "10%" to "55%" and bam, you're done.  Or "a majority" if you want to take the numbers out completely.  Either one of these would give a good impression of how things work, without being too technical (and they are both technically a bit wrong, right?  But they give a decent idea of how it works).

To your P.S. -- I have held a good number of cryptos over the past couple of years.  The majority was always in BTC, and DRK/DASH was my 2nd largest holding.  Besides those two, I also have some MaidSafeCoin (decent investment); BitShares (horrible investment); CounterParty (has lost some value, but not orders of magnitude like BitShares); and tiny amounts of NameCoin, PeerCoin, DogeCoin, and Mazacoin (the last being a horrible investment, but a great coin to mine during the first week -- I mined over 2 BTC worth of MZC quite easily with BFL SHA miners that would have been capable of mining about 0.1 BTC directly during the same period).  So, basically, I have hedged my bets; and even with my sale I still have kept about 30 DASH, just in case I'm wrong about where the price is headed.

[baddw]

But it's not win-win-win when somebody can propose something that exclusively enriches a certain few people

Out of interest, do you have a particular proposal in mind ?

Here's the list. https://www.dashcentral.org/budget/completed

It doesn't matter whether it is happening now with the current proposals, just the fact that it is theoretically possible makes it a problem.

How is it "theoretically possible" ?

The only theoretically possible scenario I see is owners setting up proposals to pay themselves for doing work that doesn't have a favourable impact on the coin's future. But there would appear to be at least 3 aspects of the stakeholding that prevent that from happening:

1. There isn't a sufficiently large coherent holding group to dominate the voting in that way. (Even though people put about that Evan / Otoh et al own this & that - the fact is they don't. They can be outvoted at least 4:1 even by the most generous estimates of their holdings. By my observations it's more like 8:1).

2. There's nothing that anyone can do in terms of the protocol - even if they did dominate the voting - that doesn't still require a mining majority. So voting could say "do this", devs say "ok" and it still doesn't get adopted because the miners rejected it

3. Even if there was such a hypothetical way for an interested group to 'enrich itself' as you say then commercial pressures would start to manifest. The group can only pay itself in Dash, not any other currency, that is the catch. The wider community can therefore still mitigate said 'enrichment' because it has control over exchange rates

It's therefore far more profitable for 'interested parties' simply to do something beneficial for the project and get paid in a high value coin. (Which is what they are doing )

I understand that the incentives are all generally aligned -- to make DASH go higher in value.  But that doesn't keep people from voting to give money to themselves or their friends. 

Basically,with all of this talk of Governance, Dash is turning itself into kind of a corporation.  The MN owners are like stockholders, and the big MN owners (hundreds of MNs) are like the Board of Directors.  If a proposal is ever put before a real-world corporate Board of Directors that could be self-dealing (e.g. a business deal with a company that is owned by a family member) or a conflict of interest (e.g. introduction of a product that might negatively impact another company, that the Director also has a substantial interest in) then they have to recuse themselves from the vote.  It's a simple ethical concept.  If Dash is trying to portray itself in this way then the power players of Dash need to make a very public effort to make everything above-board and ethical -- and that includes abstaining from voting where there might be any conflict of interest or self-dealing, or even the perception of such.  Accusations of cronyism can quickly kill this golden goose.  They would be wise to avoid them at all costs.

Just glancing through the approved proposals, I didn't notice any that mentioned getting competitive bids for any given project.  It's always "We've retained XYZ" at a given price, and I understand that's an easy thing to vote up or down, but really for a big project there should be a budget set, and then have various competitors bid on it, and the bid that provides the best value for the amount budgeted should win the project.  This is just a basic principle when running a large company, which Dash is looking more and more like.

[iCEBREAKER]

I don't think that 10% of Masternodes is nearly enough to commit funds --unless all "members of the board" / "employees" / devs / power-brokers recuse themselves from voting in every case where there is any possible conflict of interest.  Otherwise the "vote" is a complete sham.  Why even pretend to be democratic when only 10% of an already-elite group can make all the decisions?  You might as well just be Bitcoin.  If a higher percentage (at least 50% of masternodes) isn't required, then, Evan, et al (not sure who the other higher-ups all are -- but certainly anyone who is paid any kind of a salary out of the proceeds of the "development fund") need to publish their Masternodes and not vote -- let "outsiders" vote according to the merits of the proposals.

I see this as being like the ideological battle between communism and capitalism.  Bitcoin is, in a way, communist; 100% of the rewards go to the laborers (miners) (never mind that owning a decent mining setup nowadays requires a ton of real-world capital).  I like the fact that Dark/Dash has come up with a way for people to also earn rewards for simply owning enough capital.  I also like that the incentives are aligned; Masternode owners have to lock up their funds, so they can't trade in and out -- they've got to be long-term hodlers, and as more Masternodes are brought online, more Dash are locked up and out of the reach of the traders, thereby lowering supply and hopefully driving the price upward -- which rewards Masternode owners, miners, and small-time hodlers alike.  It's win-win-win.

But it's not win-win-win when somebody can propose something that exclusively enriches a certain few people, and those certain few people have enough power to make that proposal effective.  This is an effective kleptocracy, and I don't think that anybody really wants to be associated with that.  Yes, we all want to make money, but a system that basically ensures that the rich get richer is pretty sleazy IMO.  The Masternodes already do enough in that regard.  And Masternode owners are supposedly in this for the long-haul.  At current prices, a Masternode is over $20,000 -- that's a pretty hefty amount.  Masternode owners are keeping that money invested in order to earn a return -- paid in Dash.  Those Dash will be worthless if people decide to abandon the currency due to concerns about propriety among the whales / owners / developers (because they are largely the same people).  Think long-term.  The best possible proposals, for the long-term success of Dash, would be:

A) Change the voting requirement to 50% of MN owners;
B) Change the voting requirement to include some percentage of miners;
C) Dedicate some portion of the "10% funds" to trading accounts on major exchanges which is run exclusively to manipulate the price of Dash upwards.

That's my piece.  I may follow this thread a bit more, but I don't have the kind of time that I used to have for this kind of stuff anymore.  I do appreciate the further development of Dash, but I fear this self-serving "governance" is leading us all down a blind alley.

Great post.

Dash was intentionally designed to be a 'Distributed Kleptocracy By Blockchain' that keeps the Instamine beneficiaries in a position to ensure funds roll in no matter how the Kabuki governance votes.

[qwizzie]

Why do i have the feeling a certain someone will soon regret diverting all of his Dash but a handfull and why do i have the feeling
that eventhough that person stated to have very little time for forums like this, we will still see a lot of posts of this particular someone...

I find it a bit of a strange behaviour when people cash out of a certain cryptocurrency (admittently for pure profit reasons) , they will still hang around and criticize that cryptocurrency
as if to prove to themself they made the right decision.

Now for something completely different : i suspect only one or two months till we get the official announcement who will be our new major exchange supporting Dash also in FIAT pairs
(https://www.dashcentral.org/p/bsdev-general-201702). Who do you guys think it is ? Or hope it is ?
 

[dafdaf]

Now for something completely different : i suspect only one or two months till we get the official announcement who will be our new major exchange supporting Dash also in FIAT pairs
(https://www.dashcentral.org/p/bsdev-general-201702). Who do you guys think it is ? Or hope it is ?

LOCALBITCOINS!

Just kiddin'.

[qwizzie]

Now for something completely different : i suspect only one or two months till we get the official announcement who will be our new major exchange supporting Dash also in FIAT pairs
(https://www.dashcentral.org/p/bsdev-general-201702). Who do you guys think it is ? Or hope it is ?

LOCALBITCOINS!

Just kiddin'.

 

congratz on the $23,20 Dash price by the way guys.. forward and onward.

[TaoOfSaatoshi]

Great times for Dash!

[kointrend]

Now for something completely different : i suspect only one or two months till we get the official announcement who will be our new major exchange supporting Dash also in FIAT pairs
(https://www.dashcentral.org/p/bsdev-general-201702). Who do you guys think it is ? Or hope it is ?

LOCALBITCOINS!

Just kiddin'.

 

congratz on the $23,20 Dash price by the way guys.. forward and onward.

Bitstamp?

23.50 ...congrats! What exciting times ahed!

ps. The buy side on polo looks really healty.

[Macno]

I hope it will be Kraken.

[stealth923]

I hope it will be Kraken.

It's gotta be bitstamp coinbase or kraken.

[Macno]

I hope it will be Kraken.

It's gotta be bitstamp coinbase or kraken.

The most likely one seems to be Coinbase, according to what I read. To me, Kraken has the best reputation of the three, but anyone of those would be cool.

[harmani21]

9mil behind moanero and 20mil behind lightcoin!!Great times to enjoy the ride and overtake retards of crypto

[MahaRamana]

I understand that the incentives are all generally aligned -- to make DASH go higher in value.  But that doesn't keep people from voting to give money to themselves or their friends.  

Basically,with all of this talk of Governance, Dash is turning itself into kind of a corporation.  The MN owners are like stockholders, and the big MN owners (hundreds of MNs) are like the Board of Directors.  

How is that so different from Bitcoin ? In bitcoin, miners will vote with their mining power in a way that gives money to themselves or their friends. Blockstream will vote with their political and economic power in a way that gives money (and power) to themselves. etc...

You don't need a node to be a stockholder, any token holder is a form of stockholder. The same applies to bitcoin or any crypto.

In all cases, all networks are organised and governed by their constituting organs : token holders, nodes, miners, developers, ...

This is true for ALL cryptos.

We are now starting to discover that the organisation of a crypto is important and the rewards and powers have to be allocated in a harmonious way that maximises the value created by the Network.

When the self-interest of all parties aligns properly with the network's interest, you have a winning network.