Some bullish points about dash
Point of Sale (PoS) capable due to InstantSend technology:Dash can actually be adopted by commerce, unlike almost any other crypto on the market today. Dash is a (massively improved) 1st generation Bitcoin fork PoW coin, but does not need block confirmations (by miners) to consider the transaction final. Bitcoin however is essentially still unevolved and remains a '6 confirmations is considered secure and final' blockchain. With a blocktime of 10 minutes that is one hour to consider it fully secure. Even with 1 confirmation you would still have to wait 10 minutes as a client/merchant to be sure the transaction is final. From a practical standpoint Bitcoin is unusable in PoS, unless the merchant is willing to take on the risk.
This is not the case with Dash. Both for merchants and clients Dash is a vastly superior payments method and possibly the only cryptocurrency that can actually be used in real life (face to face) commerce situations without any risk. Due to the fairly recent implementation of default InstantSend for all transactions, no specific action is required from users. The transactions are also instantly respendable, which was not the case in the earliest implementation of InstantSend. Instant transactions are required to be a cash-like cryptocurrency. For example, Bitcoin Cash supporters say that BCH is the real 'cash' cryptocurrency, however they don't have instant confirmations. They actually use zero-conf transactions in POS creating the possibility to be double spend attacked. It seems however that they implemented some mitigation technology to deal with double spends (
https://doublespend.cash/about.html).
Scaling - Transactional cost (fee):Due to Bitcoin's popularity and its unevolving design, Bitcoin has become expensive to use for day to day transactions. At times the fees are so high that it's crystal clear that Bitcoin is not ever going to be used as a P2P cash technology. It's so apparent, that the narative had to be changed to 'digital gold' (store of value), which has little to no basis in reality. The 'digital gold' narrative is simply marketing and the SoV narrative is in my opinion not that solid. It may seem like a store of value now, but there's no guarantee. It will be a store of value as long as everyone keeps investing money in it. In my opinion there is no 'intrinsic value' in Bitcoin. It's a hedge against the fiat world and due to massive investment it appears as a store of value.
The problem with Bitcoin is the fact that they are stuck at the "temporarily implemented" 1 MB per block limit. Satoshi implmenented this to prevent spam attacks cluttering the blockchain. It was never intended to remain at 1 MB. This massively limits Bitcoin's potential, meaning it cannot practically scale to a global cryptocurrency which is used for day to day transactions and obviously pushes the fees up when there is high usage. Sooner or later Bitcoin will constantly hit 1MB blocks and there is no way to deal with it, other than pushing their users to pay ever increasing high fees to move up the priority of your transaction or accept that your transaction will be in the mempool for hours waiting to be confirmed. Bitcoiners could also use the "Lightning network" to deal with the high fees, but everything I've learned and seen about the Lightning network shows that it's not user friendly and has various issues. Bitcoin is basically stuck and does not have a proper answer to the scaling challenge, as long as they remain ideological about the 1MB limit. At some point people will have to admit that Bitcoin has become a dinosaur in the crypto field from a technical point of view.
I simply look at Bitcoin as a technology with no ability to properly raise its bandwidth (capacity / transactional throughput). Imagine thinking that broadband internet would forever be stuck at 1Mbps and that you are convinced this is the future.
A note must be made though, that Bitcoin implemented 'SegWit' to allow Bitcoin to have larger than 1MB blocks. As far as I know it allows a theoretical limit of 2MB.
Although Dash is used a lot less than Bitcoin, the Dash community has long voted to raise the blockchain to 2MB. Dash doesn't use or need 2MB blocks at the moment, but it shows that Dash can quickly evolve and implement a higher transactional throughput through raising the block size, just as Satoshi intended. It is frustrating to see how Bitcoin's development was hijacked by some special interest. So Bitcoin can only scale through using an additional (difficult to use) layer on top of Bitcoin (Lightning). Usage of Lightning network is going up, but remains fairly low.
Research done by the University of Arizona demonstrated that Dash could raise its block size up well beyond 10MB with an orphan rate less than 0.1%, meaning that Dash can scale up its transactional throughput to meet any potential need we may have in the future, while keeping transaction fees very low:
https://asunow.asu.edu/20180731-asu-and-dash-publish-new-research-blockchain-scalabilityhttps://dashnews.org/new-asu-blockchain-lab-research-shows-dash-can-easily-scale-near-paypal-levels/Dash has already done stress tests, in the current situation, hitting more than 3 MILLION transactions in a 24 hour period without any issues whatsoever:
https://www.dash.org/2018/11/15/stress-test-2/https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/dash-transactions.htmlTransactional privacy due to PrivateSend technology:Most blockchain projects do not have any form of privacy enhancing features, but Dash has a massively improved protocol level CoinJoin readily available in the Dash core wallet (and likely soon also in the mobile wallets). The benefit of PrivateSend is that this happens in a completely trustless manner versus 3rd party bitcoin mixers which are always a risk (not your keys not your coins). Some 3rd party bitcoin mixers have simply stolen people's bitcoin. This cannot happen with Dash's PrivateSend.
Although many adversaries have claimed that PrivateSend is traceable, this is absolutely not the case. The transactions may be transparent, but it's statistically impossible to trace the transaction back to the original sender with 100% certainty. As far as I know, no transaction has ever been 'cracked', but some have tried and some dubious claims about have been made in the past. Over the years PrivateSend has been improved a lot (increased mixing rounds, increased quorum participants, ...). It is true that it requires a small effort from the user to mix coins before using them, but that is not really a big concern to users who really want their transactions to remain private. PrivateSend is still being worked on and further improvements are still expected, because there are some minor issues left which could be improved upon (mostly to make it more user friendly).
Monero supporters say that Monero's privacy is superior and while that may be true, some risk remains that someday the Monero blockchain is fully "reversed". Supporters say Monero is the real cash cryptocurrency, but they don't have instant confirmations or any other features. At the moment Monero seems to be a niche coin focussed on one aspect, namely transactional/balance privacy. There is nothing wrong with that, they seem to be doing well, but Dash has long broadened its innovations beyond privacy alone.
Protection against 51% attacks due to ChainLocks technology:A successful 51% attack allows the attacker to reorganize blockchain events. Dash is the first PoW cryptocurrency (blockchain) that is immune to 51% attacks. This used to be a big concern with Bitcoin, but in reality very unlikely to happen. However cryptocurrencies that are using the same hashing algorithm remain at high risk for a 51% attack. All small networks are at risk for 51% attacks. Especially those that only have a small share of the hashrate of the leading coin using the same hashing algorithm. People tend to ignore that the risk is there, but as a user or investor it provides great relief that this is no longer possible with Dash. Even though the risk was already very minimal with Dash, since Dash is the leading X11 hashing algorithm coin.
Some coins have implemented checkpoints to prevent 51% attack, but these are inferior solutions to the problem. See also the repeated successful 51% attacks on Ethereum Classic. Ethereum classic should be dead, but some big players are probably keeping it alive. The risk also exists with Bitcoin Cash as they are considered Bitcoin's little brother in terms of mining hashrate (same algo).
See the following links for more detailed information on ChainLocks:
https://github.com/dashpay/dips/blob/master/dip-0008.mdhttps://dashnews.org/andreas-antonopoulos-calls-dash-chainlocks-a-smart-way-of-preventing-51-attacks/https://blog.dash.org/mitigating-51-attacks-with-llmq-based-chainlocks-7266aa648ec9https://cryptobriefing.com/chainlocks-dash-network/Governance by blockchain:Unlike many other projects, Dash has never split (hard forked) into different projects. Whenever a serious issue comes up, Dash has the ability to ask its primary shareholders (masternode owners) to vote on the direction the project needs to take. Although it may not be perfect, Dash is simply the first project that allows its large holders to 'vote on blockchain'. It provides a better way to governance compared to some other projects where conflicts are not handled properly and lead to drama and contentious hard forks, where the 'number one' needs to take a decision and everybody else is along with the ride. I have my criticism as well of the Dash governance system and it should be improved where feasible, but it's better than having nothing. Dash masternodes vote from their core wallet or they can use the service provided by
https://www.dashcentral.org/.
About masternodes:Although masternodes are a key element of the Dash network, masternodes in themselves are not a feature, they are required to provide additional services to end users, which cannot be provided by traditional Bitcoin compatible PoW blockchains (without masternodes).
The implementation of PrivateSend (Coinjoin²) required the implementation of an additional back-end infrastructure layer that allows mixing of users funds. Hence masternodes were implemented which are running the dash daemon with specific parameters enabling the enhanced features available in Dash. At first it was just PrivateSend, but it was quickly realized that having masternodes allowed the implementation of other enhanced features (compared to Bitcoin). Not much later it was discovered that masternodes could lock in transactions before they were written to the blockchain, allowing InstantSend to become a reality. Also ChainLocks cannot exist without this additional back-end infrastructure of masternodes (the so-called 2nd tier).
Masternodes allow adding features (services) on top of the Bitcoin protocol, which are difficult to implement otherwise, or practically not really feasible without them, unless you completely abandon the Bitcoin protocol. Remember, Dash is a Bitcoin fork, which means that it is easier for other parties to implement Dash, if they are already working with Bitcoin. From a code perspective, Dash is basically Bitcoin. Well, Dash is a much better Bitcoin from a technical and end user perspective.
Incentivized nodes (masternodes) also allowed the full node network to grow rapidly and provide high availability of Dash's blockchain and its services. Dash currently has approximately 5000 full nodes (
https://www.dashninja.pl/). This allows users with a core wallet to rapidly synchronize the blockchain. Compared to other projects, Dash's blockchain synchronizes very rapidly. Masternodes are hosted in datacenters and provide high availability of the Dash network.
Dash Platform (Evolution):All of above is what the Dash network offers on layer 1, but Dash Core Group is working really hard to make layer 2 (data) and 3 (dapps) a reality.
Back in 2015, even before DGBB was implemented, the Dash dev team announced the intent to develop 'Evolution' as a user friendly wallet which would help adoption with non-savvy users. At that time cryptocurrency was considered for nerds/techies only and hence the idea started to make improvements that would make crypto less "crypto". The idea was to make it easier to use, less cryptic and so on. The core feature that was announced was basically to replace cryptographic addresses with blockchain usernames. Although announced back in 2015, actual development only started much later. Around that time (2016), Evan also moved to the background and Ryan Taylor took over the project as CEO of what would later be called Dash Core Group (DCG).
Evolution was originally intended to be released much sooner, but a lot of research was done to implement it correctly. As is often the case with software projects, the idea to implement blockchain usernames provided challenges, which needed to be worked out. Don't forget also that Dash was trading at an extremely low price back then, which means there was also limited funding available.
DCG did drop the ball in terms of communicating where we were with Evolution around 2017 and should have kept everyone much better informed. Only in 2018 an updated roadmap was provided making it clear that the design was there, but that development still had to start.
In 2018/2019 additional features were also developed such as; LLMQ's allowing ChainLocks, instantly respendable InstantSend and deterministic masternode lists. So one needs to take this into account as well. DCG had to implement base architecture improvements to develop Dash Platform, while maintaining scalability.
Meanwhile we are two years further (since updated roadmap) and DCG has moved forward nicely in terms of development. DCG has also improved their communication towards the community, including quarterly calls (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNkRtaAyjYQ) providing insight into strategy, market performance, financials, tech, growth and outlook. DCG is now also using a Dash Improvement Proposal (DIP) standard providing a technical design document of the to be implemented feature (
https://github.com/dashpay/dips).
Dash Platform is actually already running on its own testnet (dubbed evonet) and we have already seen live demos of Dash's improved mobile wallets with blockchain usernames. Dash's wallet allows you to maintain a list of contacts facilitating easy 'pay contact' transactions. When it was initially announced, it was just about usernames, but today it's evolved in a Dash Decentralized Identity. DDI is actually an identity profile with several elements, including a profile picture. All of this, on the blockchain, not through some gimmickry in the local wallet. So you will see a list of your contacts with a picture making it very easy to make a payment to someone you know. No more copy pasting cryptographic addresses. Check the following videos to get sneak preview of how the upcoming DashPay wallet works using 'contacts' (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtTaezpxQOs &
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQ3_Q45HdOA &
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddq7BnO_OXc).
Dash Platform however is not at all anymore just "an easy to use wallet" (Evolution). Dash Platform introduces a second layer in our network (data) which allows data contracts. Dash Platform provides a way to store data and messages on the Dash Platform blockchain, effectively rendering Dash into a Decentralized Cloud (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WqUMrIN58Q). Dash also introduces a third layer, which is the applications layer allowing the creation of many applications expanding the Dash ecosystem. Some demo applications have already been developed to demonstrate the potential of this layer (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy8gO1C8fTs). Your DDI will be usable throughout the entire network allowing access to dapps with your decentralized identity.
Check Dash's roadmap to see where we are in terms of development and what's next (DashPay Alpha Program):
https://www.dash.org/roadmap/Dash Price Prediction:Dash is simply an amazing project with huge upside potential in terms of adoption and price appreciation, due to technological innovations which highly benefit the end user. Provided DCG releases Dash Platform V1 on mainnet in 2021 in combination with strong promotional communication and so on, Dash/USD is likely to be much higher than it is now. Dash might be the project that surprises everyone with a spectacular come back. It might not happen next year, but in my opinion, it's plausible that Dash hits +1000$ again in the coming years.
