Could Dash Be The Digital Currency For The Masses? - Comparing Bitcoin And Dash

I want to talk to you today about cryptocurrency- about a particular cryptocurrency which I find very intriguing and actually I've been obsessing over it this last week. It's the cryptocurrency that's got me most interested most excited about crypto since I first heard about Bitcoin.

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I'm talking about Dash. Dash is the 3rd largest cryptocurrency, by market cap, in existence today.

I'm going to tell you a little about the governance structure and user experience and the economic incentives that are part of Dash.

Full disclosure: What I'm going to present to you here is not financial advice and I'm not trying to tell you what you should do with your money but I'm going to show you my thinking process in what's going on here.

So let's talk about a few of the problems with Bitcoin.

Of course, we all love Bitcoin - it's amazing, its innovative, it's incredible technology.

When I first heard about it I thought, "This is going to put a big challenge to the big banks.", but unfortunately it still hasn't done that.

Here are some of the reasons it has not done that.

Bitcoin has terrible user experience starting with the addresses. Who really wants to type in 34 character string of alphanumeric characters? That doesn't make sense to anybody. Nobody wants to type that in.

When people tell me how you don't really have to remember it, you just copy and paste it, well, why would I want to copy and paste that?

I don't want to copy and paste 187.254 or whatever to get to Google - I don't want to type in an IP address. I want to just type in the name. Something which sounds friendly and is easy to remember.

Then we have this problem of security, so, you have to generate your new addresses every time you receive money .

So you can try to cover your tracks or people don't really know who you are, or something like that.

You get paper wallets or a Trezor wallet. To use PayPal I don't need to use a Trezor.

I don't need to use a paper wallet - I don't even have to be all that security conscious to use PayPal or a credit card. It just kind of works. It's relatively simple. It's very simple compared to Bitcoin.

So why do I want to have to be a security nerd - most people don't - most people just want something that works.

The other thing is making transactions.

I've been using Bitcoin for awhile now but yesterday when I made a transaction I made the simple error of forgetting to check the transaction fee so it sent with 13 Satoshis per byte or whatever the transaction is still processing waiting at the end of the queue, and we have about 30,000 40,000 unconfirmed transactions as I speak.

That's a problem. People respond by saying, "Well, that's not really a problem. I mean that just indicates that people want to use the service, that indicates demand."

Well, it does indicate demand but it also indicates a scalability problem. It indicates people have made transactions and they're not getting through.

These kind of glib responses like, "Ah well, you just need to put a higher transaction fee."

That's just like bidding it up like an auction. Like everybody is just going to keep increasing their transaction fees - that's a terrible idea. That's not a solution. So, we see these unconfirmed transactions rising, peaking higher and higher at 50,000, 60,000, unconfirmed transactions. That is not good.

That is a problem and the block size debate rages on and people tell me, "Oh well, when SegWit gets installed when segregated witness gets implemented, that's not going to be a problem anymore, and I say, "How long will that take? When will it come in when will they get it? When will they implement segregated witness?"

Of course, they don't know because nobody knows because there's no clear roadmap, there's no governance structure. That is a problem. Nobody knows when the problem is going to get solved. That's the real problem.

Another problem is the funding. Where does the Bitcoin dev team get its funding? They get it from several sources MIT media labs digital currency initiative, Blockstream, Chain Code Labs incorporated, Ciphrex, the Chinese exchange BTCC and others so several sources - Do all of these sources have bitcoins best interests at heart? We don't really know.

Even if we assume they do well, what's stopping an NSA funded company coming in and saying, "Hey, we would like to help you improve Bitcoin - here is some several hundred thousand dollars."?

We don't know what's going to happen with that. We don't know if these people have Bitcoin's best interests at heart. So that introduces this key central point of failure.

Now I know some people will just say, "Well, Bitcoin has the greatest market cap. Bitcoin has the greatest network effect."

Among crypto currencies it's great but we're not looking at what has the greatest network effect today, we're not looking at what has the greatest market cap today because if we wanted to do that we would look at Visa or Mastercard or American Express and say the debate is over. I guess they have the greatest network effect so we can all just give up and go home.

No, we want to look at what's gonna happen in the future, we want to look at the existing trends and how they're gonna intertwine. What is the acceleration and velocity that is going to change these things over time so in five or ten years, which of these is going to be best? Which is going to come out on top?

Now, let's talk about Dash's solutions.

So the problems with Bitcoin, with the user experience, with the wallet that looks like it was designed in visual basic in 2008.

They're still there. They've being there for years. They haven't changed. There's been no significant progress on that for many years.

Whereas with Dash, they're actively working on user experience so by the end of this year they expect to release Dash Evolution which is going to be a different system. There's going to be a wallet where you can log in anywhere from your phone from your computer, from somebody else's computer, similar to PayPal - you don't need to have your wallet.

Just access from anywhere in one place and you can login with the username, a human-readable username, and user name that looks like a normal word or phrase that some human would actually use instead of your computer sneezing.

Likewise when you send addresses, when you send transactions to people, you're going to use something which looks like it's readable by a human.

Then we have the solutions when it comes to scalability.

Dash has already addressed the block size debate even before the amount of transactions necessitated it. The master nodes voted and they came to a consensus saying, "Yes, let's increase the block size. When it comes to it let's increase it to two megabytes."

Dash has a governance system in place and it's funded. Bitcoin has no formal governance structure.

Masternodes can vote on whether they like something or not. With Bitcoin to have to hard fork. With Dash they don't because they can find out what the consensus is and then they can move the project in that direction.

With the economic incentives with Bitcoin, only miners get paid from the network, nodes don't get paid even though they're very important in the maintenance of the network and the dev team doesn't get paid by the network even though it's probably the most important thing.

With dash, what's the solution?

• 45% of the new coins created go to miners
• 45% of the new coins created go to masternodes who hold a 1000 Dash. They're invested in the network and they have this collateral and they also get the Voting Rights like I mentioned and they help process the transactions to make them private using PrivateSend.

The final 10%, or up to ten percent actually, goes to the Treasury which can be used to pay the dev team, can be used for marketing, and the future.

Maybe they'll be used to set up call centers, have conferences, have concerts promoting Dash.

When it comes to bitcoin, there is not a lot of economic incentive when it comes to trying to promote it except for the small amount of people who want to be advocates and trying to increase their own position or try to release this technology to people so more people know about it.

That's a small incentive compared to Dash which has a big incentive, big economic incentive, because they want to pay people who are going to create value and increase the value of the network.

so the masternodes who we know are already invested, say, "Hey, this is a proposition that is going to increase the value of the network."

We know they have at least some interest in improving the network because they have this 1000 dash, and therefore, we know that the people who submit proposals and get approved are more likely to be people who have interest in maintaining and increasing the size of the network.

So that is my case of why Dash actually will be better in the long run compared to Bitcoin. Why it's more likely that Dash will reach mainstream adoption first.

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In summary Dash is focused on user experience, Dash has addressed the block size problem and can address it better in the future if better ways come up because it can vote on it and Dash has economic incentives to improve the network based on people who are already invested and people who want to get involved and increase the value of the network.

What do you think?

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What Is Dash?

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