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March 2016 Budget Proposal

eduffield

Core Developer
It’s that time again, here are the core team budget proposals for this month. The next superblock is scheduled for block 432,016, which should occur approximately the morning (UTC) of Sunday, March 6th.

Satoshi Roundtable

As a small update from last month, Daniel and I attended Satoshi Roundtable. It was a really enlightening experience. The roundtable was not a typical conference in which we’re trying to sell ourselves to the general public, but rather a conference among the leaders of the cryptocurrency space. It was clear throughout the event that the main underlying issue of the blocksize debate is an issue of governance. The discussions provided us with insights about the conflicting interests that an effective governance mechanism will need to manage. Based on the discussions that unfolded, we have a high degree of confidence that our solution is an effective one. While our governance capabilities may need to be enhanced as we grow to a much larger size, we clearly won’t have the scalability and governance issues that Bitcoin has currently, and possess a clear mechanism to make changes to our governance model if required.

One of the other great outcomes from our experience was a new sense of urgency to improve the fiat to Dash gateways within the ecosystem and build out our existing platform so that everyone can come over now and begin using it. Bitcoin simply can’t keep up with user adoption from this point forward and that leaves users two choices: either leave the decentralized ecosystem and use fiat, or start working with alternative projects like Dash.

Another very important point to make about the Satoshi Roundtable was the very large issue with mining centralization in the Bitcoin space. When Satoshi originally invented Bitcoin, he did not anticipate the excessive mining centralization that has become a dominant force in the Bitcoin space. Due to this, we now have a small group of people that literally control the protocol consensus and their short term interests may be in conflict with the long term interests of other stakeholders, industry, users, etc. We definitely do not want our ecosystem to follow the same failed course and we definitely would have under the pooled ASIC mining paradigm. This is mainly because there are differences in efficiency that a miner can gain depending on where they live, which can give a huge advantage when their higher investment returns are compounded. Efficiencies such as cheaper labor, cheap or free electricity and even withholding newer advanced ASICs for their own mining operations, then selling them after they become less effective. After many iterations of these phenomenon in BTC we have come to a situation where the ones who have access to these advantages effectively control Bitcoin.

After hours of discussions, we believe we have found the solution to the unfair mining advantages that produce centralization around certain jurisdictions that control the production of ASICS. We will be releasing much more information about this soon, but are feverishly working on this project for v12.1. We’re going to be releasing much more information about this in the coming weeks; it’s going to be a giant advantage for the Dash project.


Previous Items:

Core Team Budget - 1,174 DASH (ongoing)
Public Awareness Campaign - 2,226 DASH (ongoing)
Dash.org domain acquisition - 2,100 DASH (payment #4 of 4)
Liquidity Providers - 121 DASH (payment #4 of 12)
Note: Liquidity Providers has been bumped out of the budget by DartPayments
We have created a new team to support the network by providing liquidity for the mixing.

Dash-Lamassu ATM Integration - 610 DASH (payment #3 of 12)
Satoshi-Roundtable - 718 DASH (payment #2 of 2)

New Proposal Items:

The core team is currently heavily focused on v12.1 and current projects, so there are no new requests from us at this point. However, we have a good deal of community participation! Here’s all of those proposals. There are various threads dedicated to discussing these proposals (here on the Dash forum and on Dashwhale) and we encourage you to engage in debates and cast your votes. The budget table is based on what will fund thus far, but the final budget can change based on the final votes.

Payment-processor
Owner: DartPayments

Description: “To drive adoption of Dash one of the important pieces of infrastructure required is a high quality Dash exclusive payment gateway with instant fiat conversion....”

URL: https://www.dashwhale.org/p/payment-processor

Manually vote on this proposal:
dash-cli mnbudget vote-many 11bf975fe2fcd8103f598b10fa241c536e4f07c011e9ba03d94afc9a8cf32d6c yes


Change-X11

Owner: SnowHater

Description: “We propose a change of the current X11 mining algorithm in order to prevent inevitable centralization of DASH network through supplant …”

URL: https://www.dashwhale.org/p/change-X11

Manually vote on this proposal:
dash-cli mnbudget vote-many b61ed8c9f55a6c13b3f14e0ff767b075f7593f818715370a79dea7acd2c40cf1 yes


Proof_of_Labour

Owner: juliomoros

Description: “This proposal is a work plan which in this stage assesses the options on the grounds of the abundant open source solutions already existing to develop a decentralized system serving to widen the options for money creation…”

URL: https://www.dashwhale.org/p/Proof_of_Labour

Manually vote on this proposal:
dash-cli mnbudget vote-many e3536048673a9077c30d84b142dc9b9c0eb55eb9b60f0200c27636fd3aa67ce8 yes

Complete Budget:

Note: USD conversion assumes $3.94 as of February 29th, 2016 for new budgets and ongoing core team budgets. Old fixed-duration budgets use the exchange rate at the time of creation. Exchange rate risk is carried only by the proposer of these budget proposals and not by the network.



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Great news!

After hours of discussions, we believe we have found the solution to the unfair mining advantages that produce centralization around certain jurisdictions that control the production of ASICS.

Out of curiosity, will this change financially damage those members who have already invested in the new ASICs (I have not), or the companies who have invested so much R&D into producing the ASICs? I hope not--it could set a dangerous precedent to anyone who is willing to invest significant capital in our ecosystem!
 
Great news!



Out of curiosity, will this change financially damage those members who have already invested in the new ASICs (I have not), or the companies who have invested so much R&D into producing the ASICs? I hope not--it could set a dangerous precedent to anyone who is willing to invest significant capital in our ecosystem!

The X11 algorithm was in place to deter ASICs. Anyone who made such investments in ASICs did it at their own risk, knowing full well DASH wanted to discourage use of said ASICs from the very beginning. DASH owes these speculators absolutely nothing. I really believe DASH should change the algorithm to send a message to those who wish to build such ASICs in the future and discourage such initiatives. If entrepreneurs want to be part of the DASH ecosystem they should start businesses like Node40 or businesses that would improve the ecosystem, not just being focused on short term gains.

Evan is right. Many of these ASIC operations were basically scams. Many ASIC sellers mined with these devices and later sold them onto unsuspecting customers after they've been bled dry of any potential profits or sold the tech after being made obsolete by a new generation which was right around the corner. Why sell them when you can make more money mining with them yourself? Doesn't make much sense now does it? We know plenty of companies like Butterfly Labs cheated their customers this way.

Also, DASH is not the only coin using X11. Those ASICs can still mine other X11 coins.
 
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Good stuff, cheers :) Very much looking forward to hearing about the plans to avoid centralisation of mining. Some of the thoughts I'd had in the past in that area led towards renewable energy, I doubt plans lead in that direction but if they do I'd be extremely interested in contributing.
 
My calculator says Total Allocated = 7309 DASH :p
Also, max. budget is not correct.
You are correct. Max budget is 7,449.79 Dash. Total allotted is currently 7,309.96. It looks as though Juan Galt's proposal will also make it in when it matures (it is currently less than 24 hours old, but it was submitted on time and has sufficient support).

This will make the final budget 7,364.96 and unallotted will be roughly 84.83 Dash. Liquidity-providers is going to be de-funded this month. It doesn't have sufficient support even if the budget had enough room since it has less than 10% net yes votes.
 
Liquidity providers might consider submitting a proposal for only 80 Dash. It will cost 5 Dash to submit, so their is some risk, but they might get more support if they provide those services less expensively.
 
Great news!



Out of curiosity, will this change financially damage those members who have already invested in the new ASICs (I have not), or the companies who have invested so much R&D into producing the ASICs? I hope not--it could set a dangerous precedent to anyone who is willing to invest significant capital in our ecosystem!
ASIC developers may be not interested in Dash ecosystem. They are interested in profit. Replacing many real people (distributed over planet) who do mining and are potential activists.
If Dash changes algorithm it will be a clear message not to develop ASIC any more. If it is good or bad for Dash - it is other question. I suppose - good.
 
We also need another Dash.org payment. The first month didn't pay out.

RE the algorithms, is there any algorithms left that would be suitable?
 
We also need another Dash.org payment. The first month didn't pay out.

RE the algorithms, is there any algorithms left that would be suitable?

I have the idea of a dynamic algorithm: https://dashtalk.org/threads/dynamic-mining-algorithmn.8207/

It is really the only resistant way. Any individual algo will have an ASIC eventually. Due to the specialized nature of ASICs if there are many different algos that change and whose parameters change based on the block #, then it will be too prohibitive for ASIC miners as they would need an ASIC for every single combinations. A general purpose chip would be much more suited in this case.
 
ASIC developers may be not interested in Dash ecosystem. They are interested in profit. Replacing many real people (distributed over planet) who do mining and are potential activists.
If Dash changes algorithm it will be a clear message not to develop ASIC any more. If it is good or bad for Dash - it is other question. I suppose - good.

I definitely see your point. My chief concern is for those community members who bought the ASIC miner. Rendering it useless would be a significant financial loss for them.
 
I definitely see your point. My chief concern is for those community members who bought the ASIC miner. Rendering it useless would be a significant financial loss for them.

Do you have any chief concern for any members who just bought 6 video cards at $350 each just in the beginning of Jan and now with ASIC flooding the x11 mining market the video cards will not earn back with mining x11 causing a significant financial loss for them?...
 
Do you have any chief concern for any members who just bought 6 video cards at $350 each just in the beginning of Jan and now with ASIC flooding the x11 mining market the video cards will not earn back with mining x11 causing a significant financial loss for them?...
I would not. Other coins can be mined with GPUs to recoup costs. In the worst case just put the video cards on ebay. Have you ever had to dispose of old ASIC hardware? The feeling is hard to describe: guilt, waste, emptiness, helplessness. Even a smart phone has a longer useful life.
 
I would not. Other coins can be mined with GPUs to recoup costs. In the worst case just put the video cards on ebay. Have you ever had to dispose of old ASIC hardware? The feeling is hard to describe: guilt, waste, emptiness, helplessness. Even a smart phone has a longer useful life.

Other coins can be mined with x11 ASIC to recoup cost even if DASH switched algo so it's kinda the same thing on either side of the argument. So worst case new X11 ASIC owners can mine a different coin. Plus this isn't going to happen overnight...if at all..we are talking hard fork aren't we?... that means no enforcement for MNs and that won't be easy to pass over on MN owners who's reward is unaffected by mining centralization.
 
Do you have any chief concern for any members who just bought 6 video cards at $350 each just in the beginning of Jan and now with ASIC flooding the x11 mining market the video cards will not earn back with mining x11 causing a significant financial loss for them?...

I have only two points, and I'll leave you to your arguments:

1) Dash was always marketed as an X11 coin. Nowhere, at least not in the last 20 months that I've been involved with Dash, did Evan ever say "It's X11 for now, but we'll change at a later date." SHA-256 eventually got ASICs. Scrypt eventually got ASICs. Unless Evan had stated his intention to continually change the algo as needed, it should stand to reason that X11 would eventually get ASICs too.

2) Dash was always marketed as an X11, ASIC-resistant coin. "ASIC-resistant" doesn't mean "ASIC-proof." If Evan had wanted to make the coin ASIC-proof, he probably would have said so in the beginning.

Anyway, I'm not a miner so why do I care? I'll leave y'all to it...

(Evan, sorry if I started a derail. I didn't mean to.)
 
David

Dash was marketed as having an ASIC resistant mining algorithm

Evan would have made an ASIC-proof coin from the beginning but it was impossible to have a PoW ASIC-proof coin. ASIC resistant was the best option at the time. It's not like it wasn't desired but sometimes you have to settle for what you can get.
 
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