TAO'S STEEM ON DASH | What's in a name?

X Dark Cash

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The name you give your company or organization can affect the way that people will relate to you. Choosing a name that is related to what you want to offer or achieve is the best way to be remembered in people's minds when they need your product, service or charity. If you have a name that is viewed negatively, or is not appropriate for the area you represent, it can affect your business.

In 2014, lead developer of X-Coin launched his project to much fanfare. Bitcoin had been very successful, and he had hoped to bring advanced anonymity to the BTC protocol. The Bitcoin core devs rejected his ideas, preferring to stay with the status quo. Realizing that there would be a real market for anonymous coins, he created X-Coin and immediately enjoyed success. Soon after the launch, however, he voiced his concern over the name X-Coin as there was a company of the same name which they wanted to differentiate from.

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The name Darkcoin was chosen because the community thought it was a perfect representation of what the currency did, which was leave people in the "dark" about transactions that were anonymized. Over the next year, however a steady hum grew that Darkcoin was a name that would be associated with dark markets and crime just because of people's pre-concieved notions about the word "dark".

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So, in 2015, Darkcoin changed it's name to Dash, which is a portmanteau of "Digital" and "Cash". The community decided that this would be the perfect name as it represents what cash is, which is private, fungible with instant transfer, but in a digital medium. The name was non-threatening and did not come with any preconceived notions, either. The name Dash has been a great success so far.

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Dashwhale rebrands to Dash Central

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When Dash's governance system first came out, you could only access it via command line in the dashd or the QT wallet. This was inconvenient for the less technical minded to take part in the voting action. Sensing a need, Dash community member Rango made a website to be a portal into the protocol-level voting process. It was a centralized website, but offered a user-friendly experience to masternode owners to take part in decentralized voting by blockchain.

Rango figured that since masternode owners were generally considered whales, he would call the website DashWhale. He made a logo of a jovial looking fat whale with a cigar in his fin, and after some initial trepidation, the logo stuck.

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Recently Dash has been growing up as a project. Investments made in the early days of the governance system have begun to bear fruit, with increased interest and investment in the project. In Dash's positive feedback loop, this will lead to even more development, creating even more value. Things are starting to get serious as Dash's marketcap briefly touched 100M, bringing Dash up to the level of the large players in crypto. Eyes will be on us.

With this in mind, Rango decided it was time to retire the whale. It had served us well for the beginnings of the governance system, but now as the project is maturing, a more professional looking page would fit better. New investors would be greeted to a classy, well designed site which would aid in voting for the first time. The new name is Dash Central, and the logo is very nice and professional.

Now the goals and names in the Dash project are meeting on the same wavelength. The growing pains are becoming less and less as the project continues on it's path to becoming digital cash for the world.

Thanks for reading. For more information about Dash's governance system, visit https://www.dash.org.

Dash Central: https://dashcentral.org

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