Dash (DASH)

Ever since Bitcoin’s value crossed a major barrier of $1000 at the end of 2016, ridiculous amount of attention and investments have been poured into the cryptocurrency market. Even though Bitcoin remains the industry’s giant and influences the price valuation of other cryptocurrencies, there remain some fundamental flaws in the technology that would perhaps never allow it to become a practical currency of choice. To address these issues, many altcoins have emerged on the scenes, and Dash is one of them.

Dash was purposely built, or rather forked off (copied) from Bitcoin, to be an easy to use cryptocurrency for mass adoption (Walters, 2019). It has been built from the basics of blockchain technology to enable it to become the simplest cryptocurrency buyers and merchants can use for their daily transactions without going into much hassle or any stress. Dash has reduced the transaction charges to such an extent that it could now be used for micro-transactions, unlike Bitcoin. The fees for a normal transaction is around $0.01. However, users are also given an option to make instant transactions (InstantSend) or private transactions (PrivateSend) for additional charges (Evan Duffield, 2018).

The current Dash product is stable, as coins can be sent through the network that is controlled by masternodes. The fees are relatively small as costs can be as low as $0.01. By paying additional fees it’s possible for a sender to make an instant transaction and/or a private transaction, but around 13% of these private transactions are traceable to their origin.

The founder of Dash is Evan Duffield, and he equally serves as the lead developer. He released Dash originally as XCoin in January 2014, later renaming it to DarkCoin. Obviously, this name created issues and was not warmly welcomed by the general public which eventually led to its rebranding to Dash (short for Digital Cash) in March 2015. There is not much information about the relevant past experience and endeavours of Evan Duffield.

The development team is headed by Evan Duffield, who also happens to be the co-founder of Dash. The current team consists of 30 developers who are all working actively towards enhancing the network. The development progress and history can be tracked on their GitHub repository.

The code is being developed under the technical leadership of Evan. The team is currently working on security measures and protocols, to stop 51% of mining attacks on the network using chain locks (Block, 2018). This is essential at this stage, as already a substantial amount of mining process is being controlled by only two parties (Tungfa, 2019).

The Dash team has a huge sum invested in the self-sustaining system. This could help to pay for partnerships and marketing, but the general codebase seems not to be ready for what the Dash coin should be used for. Many people in Venezuela might have heard of Dash, but people who live in poverty will rather buy food for their children instead of spending their money on a risky investment.

A much-anticipated project has been announced by the Dash team. They plan on introducing a platform where local stores would be easily connected with local buyers through a decentralized Dash API. This could boost the sales of businesses, while creating ease for buyers, thus putting Dash in a win-win situation.

Dash could attain an incredible height of success if it somehow manages to overcome technical obstacles and centralization risks facing it at the moment. The users can be easily attracted due to its easy-to-use nature and minimal fee charges.

The beginning of Dash, or Xcoin, is marked with it forking off the Bitcoin network. Its founder, Evan, initially programmed it in such a way that only Linux systems were allowed to mine it. The history of Dash gives rise to many suspicions, particularly because of its mining bugs. According to Evan, a bug was introduced into the network code, which made the so-called ‘instamine’ possible. Through this ‘instamine’ process, the team mined 2 million coins out of the 84 million total coins within 24 hours, using 127 computers. It was later found out that 100 of these computers were rented cloud computers that someone set up. Interestingly, the cryptocurrency was not even functional back then, so this might actually be an insider job. 2 million of 84 million tokens make 2.38% of the supply, however, Evan changed the total supply from 84 Million to 18.9 Million, without changing the existing supply in the same proportion. The instamined coins were then 10.58% (2.38% before the supply change) of the total supply which made these instamined coins more valuable. These same coins are used to make master nodes, which means they are still generating Dash rewards for their owners (Smooth, 2015).

Dash has a history of deceitful and not-so-trustworthy marketing. They were once involved in a marketing scam where they claimed that KFC Venezuela was accepting Dash as a form of payment. However, it was later discovered to be a false advertisement (Berman, 2018).

In early 2018, it was revealed that Dash has serious centralization issues and this raised many concerns. It was later gathered that two entities, whether they be people or companies, are controlling around 80% of Dash mining. This makes it vulnerable to serious network issues even if one of them creates any problem.

Initially, Dash managed to gain popularity and wide acceptance in the cryptocurrencies community. It received a warm welcome from the Reddit community and the Dash subscribers surged in the initial days. However, many of them withdrew their support in disappointment as deadlines were not being met and the Dash team was frequently in the news for issues pertaining to fraudulent activities. Currently, only a small circle of loyal active users are still supporting the technology and defending it against the critics.

Dash has been very popular in Venezuela based on the partnerships they had previously formed. More than 2500 businesses have started accepting Dash as a form of payment. A notable example is of Church’s Chicken which has nine separate locations and only accepts cash and Dash coin (Dash Venezuela, 2018).

In March 2019, CheapAir started accepting Dash as a means of payment, along with other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash (CheapAir, 2018). Later on, in the same year, another partnership was unveiled. Dash partnered with Blucon, which is a payment processing company, in an attempt to maximize its adoption as a means of payment in Thailand (Vora, 2019).

A lot of already existing cryptocurrencies are better options and alternatives in comparison to Dash, which means that the competition is quite high. Many altcoins offer much better solutions for scalability, privacy, and speed of the network. Monero, for example, is a very popular option in context of privacy. Likewise, Nano outshines all other altcoins with regard to transaction fees and speed.