Dash | Brief Description

Dash: Digital Cash

In this post, we will talk about Dash. How is it different from other currencies? If you get the foundations, you can be better at deciding whether or not this cryptocurrency is worth your investment. Let's get on with it!

FUNDAMENTALS

Dash, just like Monero and Zcash, is a currency that focuses heavily on privacy. The Dash blockchain launched January 19, 2014. The lead developer, Evan Duffield, created Dash by forking the Bitcoin protocol, but implementing a coin that focused on privacy and speedy transactions. From the Dash whitepaper:

"A crypto-currency based on Bitcoin, the work of Satoshi Nakamoto, with various improvements such as a two-tier incentivized network, known as the Masternode network. Included are other improvements such as Darksend (now rebranded to PrivateSend), for increasing fungibility and InstantX (now rebranded to InstantSend), which allows instant transaction confirmation without a centralized authority."

Sounds great, and we'll get to the technicals later. Unfortunately though, also just like Monero, Dash got off to a rocky start. Instead of a premine, there was an instamine. Meaning: 1.9 million coins were minted in the first 24 hours, and guess who got them. You're right, Evan Duffield. Right now, there are about 7.7 million coins in circulation, which means that Evan currently owns 14.6% of all the coins. At a value of $787 USD per coin, he owns about 1.5 billion USD in Dash. That's messed up. He argued that this was a small mistake due to the fact that he was very busy and distracted during the time he created Dash, but considering that he could've easily relaunched the Dash network the first days, I don't think he regrets it. Oh well.

Dash website promotional video:

QUOTED OVERVIEW

The video above, just as the citation from the whitepaper below, gives you a quick overview of what Dash aims to be.

"Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that has emerged as a popular medium of exchange and is the first digital currency that has attracted a substantial number of users. Since it’s inception in 2009, Bitcoin has been rapidly growing in mainstream adoption and merchant usage. A main issue with the acceptance of Bitcoin in point-of-sale (POS) situations is the time required to wait for the network to confirm the transaction made is valid, alternatively payment companies have created methods to allow vendors to take zero-confirmation transactions, but these solutions utilize a trusted counterparty to mediate the transaction outside of the protocol."

This is problem one they aim to solve. It is indeed known that bitcoin transactions are, for now (lightning network to be implemented soon), pretty slow. Paying for a coffee with bitcoin would be a pain. Although this is not what I see bitcoin becoming in the future (i.g. paying for coffees), some people want it to do exactly that.

"Bitcoin provides pseudonymous transactions in a public ledger, with a one-to-one relationship between sender and receiver. This provides a permanent record of all transactions that have ever taken place on the network. Bitcoin is widely known in academic circles to provide a low level of privacy, although with this limitation many people still entrust their financial history to it’s blockchain."

Problem 2: privacy. Every privacy coin is different, and it's almost impossible to predict which of them will take the lead. But Dash wants to be a part of solving the privacy problem that bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies for that matter, have.

"Dash is the first privacy-centric cryptographic currency based on the work of Satoshi Nakamoto. In this paper we propose a series of improvements to Bitcoin resulting in a decentralized, strongly anonymous crypto-currency, with tamper-proof instant transactions and a secondary peer-to-peer (P2P) network incentivized to provide services to the Dash Network."

So these 2 problems lead to the Dash network in place today. Let's see how that works exactly.

TECHNICALITIES

Dash claims to be the most user-friendly and most on-chain-scalable cryptocurrency ou there. Individuals that provide value to their network get paid, which makes it a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

Masternodes

The protocol that allows Dash to perform PrivateSend and InstantSend, is the Masternode network. Unlike bitcoin, Dash utilizes a two-tier network. Let me explain. The Bitcoin network is a single-tier network. This means that all the jobs on the network (e.g. securing transactions a.k.a mining) is done by people that all perform the same function - the miners. They use computer power to solve a hash function, and this process secures transactions and puts them in a block. Dash does the same thing, but on top of that (the second tier), there is the Masternode network.

Masternodes require at least 1000 dash as collateral to prevent sybil attacks. Put simply: you need that amount of money so no-one can steal the identity or become a Masternode, unless they have 1000 dash. Bad actors don't usually have 1000 dash. Masternodes also get rewarded for their vital network functions - they get 45% of the block reward or coinbase amount. The other 45% goes to the miners, while the 10% that remains funds the "budget" or "treasury" system. This treasury system basically pays for projects that benefit Dash, once a consensus within the network has been reached on what it should be spent. Examples: to hire new and better developers or employees, to fund attendance at conferences, and to fund integrations with major exchanges and API providers.

PrivateSend

"PrivateSend gives you true financial privacy by obscuring the origins of your funds. All the Dash in your wallet is comprised of different "inputs" which you can think of as separate, discrete coins. PrivateSend uses an innovative process to mix your inputs with the inputs of two other people, without having your coins ever leave your wallet. You retain control of your money at all times."

That is well put by the Dash website. The process works like this:

• The PrivateSend protocol begins by breaking your transactions into smaller pieces: 0.01 Dash, 0.1 Dash, 1 Dash and 10 Dash
• When you send something, your wallet sends a request to a Masternode, implying that you want to mix these smaller pieces of your transaction. Nothing that can be linked to your identity is sent to these Masternodes, they just perform their tasks because they make money doing that.
• When to other people want to mix their transactions as well (to stay anonymous), the mixing process begins. The Masternode mixes up the inputs and instructs the three users' wallets to pay the now-transformed inputs back to themselves. So that's what your wallet does, but it does so in a different address called a change address.
• For this process to fully cover your identity, this process has to be repeated a number of times with each piece of the transaction. Every time the process is completed, it's called a round. Every round of PrivateSend makes it exponentially more difficult to determine where the funds originated from.
• The process happens in the background and it happens extremely fast, so there are no extra liabilities for you to stay anonymous.

For an even more technical explanation, scroll down on this page: https://dashpay.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DOC/pages/1146924/PrivateSend

InstantSend

"This paper introduces a new concept called InstantSend (transaction locking and masternode consensus). This technology will allow for cryptocurrencies such as Dash to compete with nearly instantaneous transaction systems such as credit cards for point-of-sale situations while not relying on a centralized authority. Widespread vendor acceptance of Dash and InstantSend could revolutionize cryptocurrency by shortening the delay in confirmation of transactions from as long as an hour (with Bitcoin) to as little as a few seconds."

So, they want transactions to happen instantly. The block times are 2.5 minutes, just like litecoin, so how do they achieve that? Let's divide that up into 3 steps.

Step 1: Dash is Proof of Work, so every time a new block is created, it was by a miner who solved a hash function. This miner than submits that hash, which is random and unpredictable. The randomness of this hash is then used to select 10 Masternodes.

Hash example that originates from "hello-world" (SHA-256):
AFA27B44D43B02A9FEA41D13CEDC2E4016CFCF87C5DBF990E593669AA8CE286D

Step 2: These 10 Masternodes are now considered, until the next block is created, to be the InstantSend "authorities". So when you click InstantSend before transacting, the inputs of the transaction will be locked by those 10 Masternodes. They broadcast that message (that these inputs are locked) to the rest of the network. Any transaction that uses the same inputs but sends it to another address will be rejected to prevent the double spending problem.

Step 3: Both the sender and the receiver will see 5 confirmations on the transaction within 1 second after the message has been broadcast to the network. That's pretty fast.

Alright, we're done here. That was a brief but good description of the Dash network. Hope you learned something! You can vote on the comments for what cryptocurrency/asset you want me to explain next.

Sources:

• Dash Website - https://www.dash.org/
• Chris Burniske & Jack Tatar - Cryptoassets: the innovative investor's guide to bitcoin and beyond
• Dash Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash_(cryptocurrency)