Are you just concerned with the 100% mining coins? No need to compete with non-mineable coins (which are the majority)?...And how does it not follow that all other coins that pay to stake/hold/delegate are not competitive either (Tezos, ATOM, etc, etc, soon Cardano and maybe one day ETH)?
Chains like ETH, XTZ et al are a world away from Dash in terms of market sector. They are designed from the ground up as
services. They are not stores of value primarily. This is why archetypes are everything because crypto-assets are
synthetic assets. You can't start off being gold, then decide to be a bit of a gold coin then say, "hey..those equities over there are getting a bit of love, we need some 'a that luv as well", then, "hey..we need to be a currency also !".
That is destructive and will end up creating a carbuncle out of what was originally a very promising archetype that Dash was following. This is why I said:
Sometimes I don't think Dash investors realise what they bought or how to protect it.
Dash has not a hope of competing with the non-mined chains on their own territory. Their token issuance is arbitrary for a start (as opposed to competitively mined). They can run rings round us on services - create entire stable coin platforms, host national GDP sized bond offerings, on and off-chain apps, you name it. Those chains are having utility priced in. They're valuable while they're useful and valueless when they become obsolete. As an archetype, more
like a corporation than a precious metal. They are well suited for paying dividends because they're more like equity investments in that they can pay a return based on activity growth.
Dash is nothing like this. It inherits bitcoin's monetary model which is a digital commodity that's invested in for capital growth. You would not normally expect to receive a revenue from such an investment (because there's no service provision and no service cost for the holder). If you ain't got capital growth you got "nottin". The idea of the masternode revenue was to incentivise a high performance node network and make the capital asset more competitive (as a
capital asset, not a service). Nor is currency an appropriate archetype for Dash other than in a barter sense because it's not a stable coin (if it was it wouldn't be worth investing in other than as a hedge).
For all these reasons, sacrificing mining reward for masternode reward amounts to cannibalising the capital. Like when a person starves and the body starts consuming its own organs to stay alive. Sounds a bit melo-dramatic but that's how I see it.
How do you know DASH is not less competitive (your conclusion, one I don't share) because of some other trait, maybe not enough marketing directed at the right audiences?
How very myopic if I may say so.
Were you here for the last 4 years ? Dash out-marketed everybody. What "marketing" does Litecoin do ? What does XMR do ? What do the bitcoin forks do ? None of them even had a marketing budget never mind a fully funded core group or army of decentralised marketing recruits while we have had budgets in the millions. Ben Swan alone was paid in 7-figure dollar sums. Merchants were plastered in Dash stickers and given POS terminals all across Venezuala for years. Amanda B. Johnson drew audiences from everywhere. We had Dashforce, eduction arms in Germany and we got listings on all major exchanges including Coinbase.
What those other coins DO have that we don't, however, is an efficient monetary protocol that rewards the stakeholders who bear the the network costs instead of the ones that don't.
Why look at indirect effects on competitiveness when you have a direct one staring you in the face ? Answer: cognitive dissonance and a blind tribal belief in the asset because that's what we're invested in. I've seen it in every single community from Blackcoin onwards. Even
Cinnicoin was like this. Completely incapable of re-appraising what they were invested in any dispassionate way.
Unfortunately, the only meaningful appraisal in these matters can come from un-invested parties and I'm afraid those are even scarcer than a 100% mined crypto in this debate.
After being created in a bear market, DASH has gone thru exactly one bull market ...It's showing every sign in technical analysis that it's fighting to enter its second bull market.
Is it ? What I see is that it's showing every sign of a dead cat bounce. Buoyancy is about as robust as a lead balloon. We hit rock bottom, bounced a bit, and are now trundling along at a bitcoin ratio from early 2014 days. As far as investment performance is concerned, it's against bitcoin that matters. If bitcoin hits $200,000 one day do you think a masternode will be worth $1.4 million ? That's $9 million a WEEK in masternode revenues. Half a BILLION per year. How will you justify to markets maintaining a valuation that supports such a gargantuan revenue stream doing effectively nothing ?
Even if a masternode were to be worth $200,000 at that point (which will be nearly 3 x from here), that puts Dash price at only 0.001 BTC. A loss of over 80% from here. That is why competitiveness and ranking matter, because without them you'd be better off buying BTC unless you're using Dash to buy chicken nuggets.
IMO, Dash has no option but to stick hard with its original archetype which is to inherit as much of bitcoin's monetary model as possible while making it versatile and easy to use, otherwise it'll fall into the crack between stores of value and services and disappear out of the top 100.
