The DARQ Ep.13 - Decentralization in DASHhttp://darq.io/episodes/ep13It's been a while, I've been super busy with other stuff. Unfortunately I don't have any more excuses to use. It's a known fact that I can't keep any promises regarding a schedule for my show. But here I am, still doing work, recording voice and providing information. I wont be making any more promises except that my show will continue.
Today I wanted to talk about decentralization.
Decentralization is important if our societies want to remove the shackles chaining us to the floors. It's a fact that Centralized authorities abuse their power. Just take a look at the central banks all across the world and the economic turmoil these banks have caused. Take a look at how they have no problem bailing out their buddies who commit crimes and ruin peoples lives. Go watch the movie The Big Short and see if you can tell me, with a straight face that these big centralized banks have your best interest at heart.
They're in it for the money and power. They're not in it to help the little guy, that's why they charge you $25 for overdraft fee's.
What other options do we have? Well that's what the DASH developers are working on and it's called DASH Evolution. Dash developers consider evolution to be "the next step in cryptographic currency providing various advanced features and assisting in the creation of decentralized technologies." Evolution will introduce a tiered network design that allows users to do various jobs for the network.
Before we dive into Evolution lets go over some of the History behind Dash. It was launched in early 2014 and originally known as darkcoin. Shortly after it's inception the developers introduced the first decentralized privacy system based on the Bitcoin protocol CoinJoin. Coinjoin is centralized and users have to send their funds outside of the bitcoin network to a centralized CoinJoin service. That means the user no longer has control of their funds and could easily be ripped off. This happens very often.
Dash on the other hand wanted to create a decentralized implementation of coinjoin where users could anonymize their transactions without having to trust a 3rd party centralized service. The solution was to expand the Bitcoin peer to peer network enabling full nodes which provide the transaction mixing service. Basically you can mix your coins on the DASH network without ever having to trust a 3rd party centralized service. All mixing is done via the qt client right inside your wallet. No funds are sent off the blockchain.
Darksend works but it's a little slow at the moment. Improvements are coming and hopefully mixing in the future can be done in a matter of minutes, maybe even seconds.
After implementing darksend into Dash, the Developers decided they weren't done. The creation of the 2nd tier masternode network help them realize that the masternodes could provide a lot of additional benefits that a single tier network like Bitcion could not.
-One of the first innovations on top of the DASH 2 tier network was a method to provide instant transaction confirmations through transaction locking and masternode consensus. Dash Developers called this InstantX and the new method enabled users to pay instantly with dash, because Who actually wants to wait for 3 bitcoin confirmations? I sure don't want too, and neither does your every day average computer user.
Soon the Dash developers realized something else, that masternodes were providing a service to the network so shouldn't they be rewarded? This resulted in a push to reallocate a % of the mining block reward to masternode operators, in turn giving them an incentive to continue operating their full nodes. Because every masternode in the Dash network is also a full node.
Mean while in bitcoin land the core developers have been arguing and continue to argue over what roadmaps to take and what code to implement into the network. Dash Developers taking note of this decided to come up with another solution. The Decentralized Governance by Blockchain which allows masternode operators to vote on budgets proposed by people looking to allocate funds towards a project that could potentially help DASH.
Since it's inception, the Decentralized Governance by Blockchain has funded the promotion of Dash conferences around the world, acquired high value property directly from the blockchain (the dash.org url) and has provided funding for many other projects that are very important to the long term success of the DASH ecosystem.
This leads us to Dash Evolution. Developers have identified several new changes that they can make in order to provide new capabilities to the network, bringing cryptocurrencies much closer to mainstream adoption.
Here's a list of some of the features the Developers plan on implementing into DASH with Evolution. 1) dashdrive - a decentralized file system that lives on the second tier network. 2) d-api or DAPI - a decentralized API which allows third tier users to access the network securely. 3) dashpay decentralized wallets - which are lightweight clients connected to the network via DAPI and run on various platfomrs. 4) an improved 2nd tier masternode network which provides compensated infrastructure for the project. 5) Budgets – The second tier is given voting power to allocate funds for specific projects on the network via the budget system 6) Governance – The second tier is given voting power to govern the currency and chart the course the currency takes
Primitives – Developers introduce Users, Groups and Accounts which allow a common way of interacting with the network. 9) Social Wallets – By utilizing primitives, developers introduce a social wallet, which allows friends lists, grouping of users and shared accounts.
That's the short list and nothing's certain but you get the basic idea of where the developers are headed.
Now I'm going to review in detail some of the features Dash Evolution will provide.
The Decentralized API. What is an API? It stands for Application Program Interface and it's a set of routines, protocols and tools for building software applications. They are mainly used when programming graphical user interface components.
Let me give you an example. You watch a lot of sports and you have a few favorite websites you go to for information about these sports, such as your favorite players, how many goals they score, how many minutes they play, how many games they sit out, injury updates, what team wins, what team loses and much much more. But where does your favorite website get this data from? Well an API of course! They pull data from somewhere else and display that data all pretty like on their website for you to see. But What happens if the server they are pulling data from goes down? Well the data on their website could be wrong or out of date and not there at all.
The Dash API or better known as DAPI is a decentralized API implemented by using small processing groups of masternodes harded by proof of work randomization. Users can execute simple requests of HTTP, this will update their information and these small clusters perform the work as a group in action, executing the event many times and signing the result. There is no longer a reliance on any individual centralized server providing data for your web application.
Why is this important? Because Merchants can integrate Dash Evolution into their eCommerce store as easily as they do with centralized services like paypal or google wallet. It's gonna be cheaper, faster and gives them the ability to transact directly with customers without having to use that pesky 3rd party charging fee's up the ass for limited access.
Another feature planned for Evolution is a decentralized storage system allowing the storage of metadata and other network related data to be stored on the network on behalf of users. using DAPI and the decentralized storage system gives developers the ability to create easy to use primitives, which dash developers define as users, groups, accounts and features such as private messaging, name based payments, and more. Users can move from device to device automatically syncing all of the data stored. This is all done on the blockchain and not some central server somewhere like dropbox does.
Dash Evolution consists of a lot of other new features that will make cryptocurrencies easier to use and help bring the technology to mainstream people who otherwise would never attempt to wrap their heads around it.
In my next episode Ill be talking a lot more about Dash Evolution. Ill go into more detail about the 2 tier network and how that functions. Ill talk about the 3rd tier, the users, and what the developers have planned for them, such as Dashpay, the social wallet, DashDrive and all the other cool stuff regular non techy people will learn to appreciate.