UPDATE: In addition to everything already posted below, Evan has given us a new one:
It's just going to be for normal operations. So if you want to use DS, it will require the core client. We would have funded DS for electrum, but I've figured out how to make DS instant (+ blinded) so we're going to depreciate the existing design and move to a new, far superior implementation in the near future. v13 is going to be pretty impressive.
Plus the other stuff I already posted...
Evan has recently hinted at some earth shattering new things that are coming to Dash. In his own words: "Let's just say we're changing our tagline from 'Reinventing cryptographic currency' to 'Reinventing Money.'"
The last time he got so excited about something, we ended up with InstantX. The time before, we ended up with Darksend and a two-tier network. Just because I enjoy speculating, I've gone back through Evan's posts, both here and on dashtalk, and came up with some ideas.
Part of the Big Thing (TM) that's coming is apparently related to confirmationless wallets which would make 51% attacks impossible:
The goal is to make a confirmationless wallet, where all transactions are protected by IX. 51% attacks become much less powerful in that case, they can't really touch IX. That would protect our millions of users we're currently shooting for (valid / non-illegal users btw), which leaves an attacker one option... to buy masternodes to attack Dash. We know how that will go.
We really do have an end-to-end solution to all problems within crypto now. I'm working on a 50+ page whitepaper that details the rest of the solution, I'm quite excited about it Grin
Here's another one for good measure. We have sub-quorums for super secure tasks, but we could implement full-quorum based actions the masternode network can take as a whole. For example, banning attacking pools from the network, people, countries, etc.
This alone would be HUGE. All Proof of Work currencies are plagued by the threat of a bad actor (or several in collusion) wrecking the network by double-spending or other malicious behavior which is made possible when they control 51%+ of the network's hashrate. Our very own currency is no exception: coinmine.pl has had over 50% of the hashrate for many weeks now, with no signs of that changing anytime soon.
The Duff apparently hasn't stopped with just one Big Thing but has come up with a second major idea as well:
Dash v13 will have a different type of blinding. I've reinvented the way it works and it's a million times better, literally. It's going to be really slick.
Some sort of improved masternode blinding system will enhance the privacy of Darksend by not allowing masternode operators to "snoop" on any mixing that is happening on their masternode. When successfully implemented, this will take Dash's privacy features to the next level.
The combination of these two things, and possibly more? leads to Evan's comment about not just reinventing crypto, but reinventing money itself! Apparently he's confident enough to put his money where his mouth is:
Well, I'm a buyer. I'm pulling out part of my savings and putting in back in. This is nuts.
And in addition to buying his own product/currency (dogfooding as the tech industry calls it), has spent his own money to improve Dash in other ways too:
When we had originally setup the foundation we had hoped at some point we could be paid back for the incorporation and legal fees. Originally when it was set up, Ed Moncada of the foundation funded it from his own pocket, which was paid to our lawyer Harold. A few months later, I agreed to pay Ed back out of my own pocket, which was $7000.
And:
The community originally was working on the electrum client, but eventually we realized that the project had stalled out. I offered to put up a bounty for $750 for the completion of this project.
And:
My wife and I are personally covering about 50% of the expenses for this trip beyond what’s needed for me to get there and give the presentation.
With respect to branding and PR:
Meh, we haven't done any brand building yet. That's the next step in our evolution, we'll show up in all of the right places soon enough
In the more distant future, we know that Evan also has a plan for greater scalability. When asked how many transactions per second Dash might be able to support someday, he replied:
The design in my head is nearly unlimited.
More specifically, with respect to scalability, we have a hint at how it might be implemented:
We know that InstantX requires the participation of 20 masternodes, and that as of 9/10/15 there are 3050 masternodes, and that each masternode can participate in multiple IntantX quorums. We'll see what exactly Evan comes up with, but it sounds like the masternode network is pretty much limitless in terms of its ability to send InstantX transactions.
He says even more about scalability here:
As for our position in this debate, we’re not in any immediate danger and have a plan for how to deal with this issue when it comes up. In fact we’re already planning the tools for how we will support a massive amount of transactions. What if we kept the blocksize limit at 1MB and had a great wallet for general users that used off-chain transactions the majority of the time? As a result we would have a small blockchain, low fees and nearly limitless transaction support. The goal is to stay lean and allow for growth at the same time.
Additionally, we know from the Let's Talk Bitcoin interview that Evan is working on some form of blockchain pruning, which would go hand-in-hand with the transaction-per-second improvements. He talks more about it on BCT as well:
That's the on-chain size, but by then we'll have pruning. So we'll just be storing unspent outputs. Even if the blockchain is a terabyte pruned, it's only being stored by the masternodes on this separate chain.
Additionally, we have the Decentralized Governance By Blockchain (DGBB) fully implemented now, where the Dash network will itself pay for the development and promotion of the Dash ecosystem, pending approval by the masternodes. This system has only just launched, and like the launch of masternodes a year ago, I think we have only begun to see the possible uses for it.
We aren't 100% sure when The Future of Dash (including the two new whitepapers) will be released. Many of us were thinking that he would announce everything and release the whitepapers to coincide with his October 7 speech at Bitcoin Wednesday in the Netherlands, but after rereading all his posts I don't see any confirmation of this. The only thing we know is:
Actually this paper is quite special and we're going to release this the correct way. This is going to be huge
Evan implies that everything that has been accomplished with Dash so far has just been a matter of laying a foundation. In a move that went largely unnoticed, Evan reinvented the way development works by creating a professional project management team and:
As a decentralized, open source project one of the greatest challenges is coordinating a distributed team and making sure we work according to industry standards. Thanks to the efforts of our project management team we have implemented a full suite of professional tools to ensure delivery excellence.
JIRA - an industry leading tool - will be used for assisting the development and quality assurance by organizing to-dos and prioritizing issues. It will also be open up to the public so the community can easily help in bug testing/reporting.
JIRA Service Desk addon will handle community submissions to the teams working on Dash, whether they be bugs, ideas, or suggestions.
Confluence will be used for both internal and external documentation, with the intention of improving overall project documentation, and having a central place where community members can find information.
Confluence Questions will be used as a place where community members can ask and answer questions about Dash. It's like a community maintained FAQ, where both team and community members can contribute by answering the questions raised. Combined with the superb search functionality of Confluence this tool can be used as the central place for distributed knowledge related to Dash.
Bamboo will be used by the development team for automated tests and builds
The entire platform is professionally hosted by Atlassian with multiple administrators on the team to provide redundancy. There is still a lot of work to do but we are taking firm steps in this direction.
The truly extraordinary things are to come:
What's really cool is we will use this to expand the narrative to the general public, create a great website and make some really easy conversation pathways to get people into the ecosystem. When we see some price appreciation, we'll actually have more money to work with, that will allow us to do even more and use better services and reward those that work on the project to a greater extent.
And:
We are officially the most decentralized project in crypto and probably even the world? We're planning on solving all of the problems in crypto in ways that are scalable and decentralized and believe we have the solutions for these already, unlike Bitcoin, with centralized Lightning, centralized mixing, centralized instant transactions, soon to be centralized infrastructure (larger blocks will create that), centralized governance and centralized funding.
And:
By the way, we have the technology we need now to show the world, the killer app for Bitcoin is Dash. We are Bitcoin 2.0. We can't allow something to take over that is so centralized by design, when there are other far superior ways of doing things. The future needs pure decentralized system. We also now have a very stable foundation to work with, while we implement the next generation of crypto. Buckle your seat belts, we're ready to go
And, responding to a troll on BCT:
The true irony is knowing about this project so early in it's life and not seeing what is right in front of you. That's going to sting in five years...
With respect to trolling:
FUD is what powers Dash. I've gotten a bunch of ideas from it including the one about the masternode network being an active force to deflect attack. Keep it coming people
Regarding skeptics like Peter Todd:
I think he just didn't understand the masternode quorum system's security model, it's not very complicated but it's a brand new model compared to the blockchain. That's OK, the nice thing is DarkSend, InstantX and the governance system will work whether he understands them or not. It took years for the general public to understand that Bitcoin wasn't a scam/breakable, it will probably take the same amount of time. I'm going to start doing a lot more presentations and videos about how all of this works to educate, hopefully that helps.
I think we can safely say that the next year or two is going to bring about big things for Dash. I also want to be clear about something: this is no longer a one-man project. I quoted only Evan, because that was the purpose of my post. Evan is essentially the genius visionary behind the project. But there are many developers, testers, project managers, writers, public relations workers, legal experts and the like who are working to improve Dash as well.
This project has matured far beyond one man. A combination of our large core team and Decentralized Governance By Blockchain system gets us past the "what happens if Evan gets hit by a bus" stage!
