Bitmain spends 700 million to buy Dash, what exactly is it fancy?
Produced | Odaily (ID: o-daily)
Produced | Odaily (ID: o-daily)
Snowden, V God and Gavin Wood, the two founders of Ethereum... This year, the ancient "anonymity technology or privacy technology" has been recommended by more and more people, and LTC has also decided to support the MimbleWimble-based Privacy transactions.
The blooming of a hundred flowers also means intensified competition. At the same time, exchanges such as the United States, Japan, and South Korea have successively removed anonymous coins. The "three major anonymous coins" - Monero, ZCash, and DASH appear to be in jeopardy.
Privacy is the future, but privacy coins are notPrivacy is the future, but privacy coins are not" mentioned, "In order to 'self-help', Dash Core CEO Ryan Taylor frequently spoke out in the second half of this year, clarifying that Private Send (private transactions) is only one of the options, and this type of transaction only accounts for less than 1% of the Dash network. Transaction. Ryan Taylor’s defense won Dash a chance to review (such as OKEx Korea announced the temporary suspension of Dash and Zcash’s offline plan); but on the other hand, it also revealed the situation that privacy options are “almost unused.”
However, Raico, the head of the Dash Chinese community, said that what Dash wants to do is never an anonymous currency, but a payment digital currency, Digital Cash (digital cash), and anonymity is just an optional function.
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The "anonymous currency" favored by Jihan Wu
The highest currency price of Dash is 1,500 US dollars, and the market value is 11.7 billion US dollars. At the beginning of 2017, it surpassed ETH and ranked second.
The reason for the soaring currency price at that time was rumored to be because of Bitmain’s layout. It is difficult to tell whether this news is true or false, but according to the previously leakedBitmain pre-IPO investorsIt can be seen from the document that Bitmain did increase its holdings of 310,000 Dash in 2017, totaling $100 million.
Now, Dash has lost 95% of its value. Fortunately, Dash still ranks second in the subdivision of anonymous coins, and the first is Monero, which was born earlier.
Monero defines itself as an "Untraceable Digital Money", and the anonymity method adopted is also very radical-transaction address, amount and other transaction information are hidden. The same is true for ZCash, except that Monero’s entire network transactions default to anonymous transactions, while ZCash can choose not to be anonymous.
Dash has instant payments by default, with anonymous payments as an option.
Dash uses a technology called "Coinjoin" to achieve anonymous transactions. This technology mixes coins belonging to different people (minimum 3 transactions), splits them and then sends them, thus separating the connection between the two parties.
The more rounds of mixing, the more random the transactions are split, the lower the probability of being tracked, and the better the anonymity.
As a more practical anonymous technology, Coinjoin is also used to enhance the anonymity of Bitcoin. However, Bitcoin is operated by paying to a third-party currency mixing service provider.
The use of currency mixing in Bitcoin is far more than that of Dash. According to Longhash data, as of April 2019, BTC transactions using Coinjoin tripled from a year ago, accounting for 4% of all BTC transactions, far exceeding 1% in Dash.
Anonymity coins have long been firmly bound to the dark web and illegal transactions. Dash initially used anonymity as a symbol, which can be described as "the foundation of fortune". Now this image is obviously out of date.
According to the Dash community, Wu Jihan once left a message on Dash Github, saying that the degree of anonymity of Dash is "enough", and this function is not liked by the government.
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The setback of Bitcoin and the birth of Dash
Raico is one of the earliest investors in Dash. He has been paying attention to the development of the project since its launch in 2014. From his perspective, we can see how Dash was formed.
According to Raico, he has been in contact with Bitcoin since 2011, and has participated in mining, speculation, buying and selling mining machines, etc. He also often dives on bitcointalk, the base camp of bitcoin enthusiasts.
2013 was the second big bull market for Bitcoin. Bitcoin rose a full 100 times that year, which stimulated the emergence of many altcoins (altcoins). At the same time, the Bitcoin community has also become mixed: speculators, traders, exchanges, miners, dealers, etc., all stakeholders gather on bitcointalk.
Raico feels that it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish who is the real beneficiary of this system, and does not know how to make decisions that can really help this system to flourish. "The original simple forum has gradually changed its taste. Speech is not so free and open, and people with different opinions may attack each other."
At this time, Raico noticed a hot post on AltCoin Setion. "I clicked in accidentally at the time, and I planned to quit immediately, but the name Darkcoin is quite interesting. After seeing that there are still many people discussing it, I started to understand. I think this is fate, haha."
The focus of Darkcoin’s discussions at the time was first how to increase anonymity on the basis of Bitcoin, and then there were more and more proposals, such as how Darkcoin can effectively manage community voices, deal with differences, and so on.
"It discusses various problems encountered by Bitcoin, such as the power of Bitcoin is integrated in computing power, the incentives for developers are insufficient, and differences are difficult to run in... In contrast, the new Darkcoin contains solutions to all these problems. ambition and hope.” Thus, Bitcoin believers like Raico turned to participate in Dash.
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Image from: Dash China Community
The difference is also formed in the development of Dash over the years. Compared to Bitcoin, Dash has two main differences.
One is the masternode network on top of the PoW miner network. The master node has four major functions, providing mixed currency services, instant payments, chain locks against 51% attacks, and community voting governance. The network uses a PoS mechanism to reach consensus.
The second is a unique economic model/governance mechanism. 45% of block rewards go to miners, 45% to masternodes, and 10% to the "budget system DASH DAO".
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"Budget system" with 10% block reward
Dash's decentralized autonomous organization DASH DAO, its most important function is just like its name "budget system", which can draw 10% of the fee from block rewards to provide incentives and budget for network development.
It is worth noting that ZCash also has a similar "sweepstakes" model, which gives funds to relevant operating companies. No narrative here.
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Image from: Dash China Community
Dash's development team, Dash Core Group (currently has more than 20 regular employees), also needs to submit a budget proposal to apply for funds every month. It can be regarded as being employed by Dash, and generally gets 50-60% of the budget every month.
DASH DAO was originally designed to solve the incentive problem of developers, and later evolved into an important governance model.
In 2015, Dash considered increasing the block size from 1MB to 2MB, and after months of community discussion, the Dash Core Group created a scaling proposal in the network. DASH DAO completed the voting in 1 day and passed the proposal.
Raico gave another example: Amanda, a blockchain celebrity on Youtube, took the initiative to apply to manage Dash's official account because she was optimistic about Dash. The community has different opinions on this, and finally decided to vote on the budget system.
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How to achieve instant payment and resist 51% attack
In addition to the anonymous and budget system, Raico mentioned the instant payment of Dash in 1 second.
How is this done? It is necessary to mention Dash's two-tier network.
For example, Alice requests the network to pay 1 Dash instantly to Bob. The Dash network will randomly select 30 master nodes (the specific number depends on the amount) to form a long-term master node arbitration chain to verify the legitimacy of the transaction. After most nodes authenticate, the transaction will be locked and can be regarded as credited. At this point, Bob can already use this Dash.
Then, the master node broadcasts the transaction to the entire network, just like Bitcoin bookkeeping, and the miners verify the transaction and write it into the latest block.
Instant transactions are realized through the mechanism of "cut first and play later" by randomly selected master nodes. There are currently more than 5,000 Dash master nodes, and each master node has pledged 1,000 Dash in the network as a deposit, which means that an instant payment is guaranteed by millions of dollars. Raico believes that the master node will not do evil for a little profit.
To resist 51% attacks, rely on the "chain lock" mechanism.
After miners generate blocks, the master node network will also randomly select 400 master nodes (nodes that are always online) to generate long-term arbitration chains (Long-Living Masternode Quorums, LLMQs), and lock the blocks according to the timestamp. Even if a large miner who holds more than 51% of the computing power of the network releases a new block later, although the new chain is the longest chain, it does not have the confirmation of LLMQs, so it will be rejected by the network and abandoned.
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How far is Dash from "digital cash"?
How far is Dash today from becoming a "digital cash"?
Let’s first look at a set of data from Blocktivity.info. In the past 7 days, the Dash chain has 20,000 daily active users (actually active addresses), which is 2.7 times that of Monero and 5.7 times that of ZCash.
According to Raico, the first two years of Dash were spent building infrastructure, and after 2016, the “Evolution” version was optimized to increase the adoption rate of Dash. 2017 was the birth of the mobile wallet. The version to be updated at the end of the year will display encrypted addresses in the form of usernames.
He revealed that the second country where Dash is most widely used is Venezuela, where inflation is severe. In 2018, Venezuela’s legal currency, the Bolivar, depreciated by 13,700 times and faced US dollar sanctions. Therefore, Dash, which focuses on localized operations, has achieved a good local adoption rate.
In 2018, Dash Core Group and Dash Help Me (specially established for Venezuela) cooperated to cooperate with Kriptomobile, a local low-end mobile phone manufacturer, to build Dash wallet and other components to increase the adoption rate of Dash.
At the same time, there is a small amount of Dash in the built-in components that is provided to users as a trial fee. At the same time, Dash also integrates local merchants so that local people can really use Dash, such as charging mobile phone bills, etc. Dash Help Me also serves as a customer service group to answer users' questions in detail.
As of early December, with more than 60,000 mobile phones Kriptomobile mobile phones poured into the Latin American market. Among them, Venezuela accounted for 53,000 units, and the usage rate of Dash in these mobile phones reached 22%.
However, compared with more blockchain projects positioned as "digital cash" and "world currency", Dash still has a big gap. The daily activity of BTC is 37.5 times that of Dash, 12.4 times that of BSV, and 2 times that of BCH.
Dash, which has been born for 6 years, still has a long way to go.
