History of blockreward allocation

[VONCAN]

18 January 2014 - Dash's birthday
It all started in the distant 2014 quite usual - like most other coins at the time, in Dash it was the miners who received all the reward for mining a block, but even then, the founder of the project - Evan Duffield thought about the future and made global plans.

25 May 2014 - Payments to masternodes starts
Five months after the launch of Dash, masternodes were launched, which in May began earning 10% of the mining reward for a block.

25 June 2014 - Doubling the payout to masternodes
However, Evan realized the need for additional measures to protect the network, as masternodes were already the basis for the important, even though optional, DarkSend (currently CoinJoin) feature. To increase decentralization and security, he doubled the reward of masternodes, effectively giving them 20% of the block reward.

November 2014 - Masternodes Network Strengthening Plan
In October, Evan said that the reward for masternodes would be gradually increased to strengthen the network and protect it from sybil attacks, making it more expensive for attackers to control a significant portion of masternodes. Between November 2014 and March 2016, the plan was to increase the share of masternodes to 60%, but the plan was never fully implemented, only partially - in April, the share of masternodes reached 42.5%.

May 2015 - Dash, the world's first DAO
The concept of the Dash DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization), invented and implemented, has led to new changes in the reward system. The reward for a block has been distributed not only between miners and masternodes, but also between the treasury, which in turn funds projects that make Dash and the Ecosystem better. Masternode and treasury rewards have been steadily increasing, and on April 11, 2015, masternode rewards were 45% and treasury rewards were 10%, a distribution that will remain unchanged for the next 5 years.

July 2020
At this time, Ryan Taylor of DCG published a proposal to gradually increase the share of masternodes in order to incentivize the retention of existing masternodes and attract new ones, as well as to slow the growth of Dash circulating supply. This proposal would have allowed for a gradual increase to 54% of the block reward for masternodes, with no impact on the treasury's share.

But it is likely that evolution under this plan will stop at the 37.62% / 52.38% / 10% ratio, which has been active since August 2023.

Because in September 2023, CTO DCG - Sam Westrich, published a proposal for a new allocation:

• Miners: 20%
• Masternodes: 60%
• DAO treasury: 20%

This change was originally supposed to be implemented with the release of the Dash Platform, but another proposal was approved to speed up the integration. Therefore, the new distribution will be activated along with the network hardfork when Dash Core v20 is released, which is for now scheduled for release by December (believe and hope). This will allow for faster integration and further development of Dash by providing a greater share of rewards to masternodes and treasury.

See the spreadsheet with more accurate data | Open access with commenting, so if you see errors in my calculations, please report them.

 

[qwizzie]

Actually the plan is to release Dash Core v20 to Mainnet mid November 2023 (see https://github.com/dashpay/dash/issues/5582).
Sam Westrich did mention the following :

Frankly speaking either the reallocation must happen in December or the price of Dash must increase significantly or else we will not be able to pay all our developers in December and hence many will most likely leave the project.

Source : https://www.dashcentral.org/p/DCG-SUPPLEMENTAL-OCT23

Which means Dash Core v20 must have its first hard fork (the one that needs 80%-60% miner support) locked-in and activated in December 2023.
If the hard fork fails to lock-in and activate in December 2023 (due to miners needing more time for example), then the effort to expedite the blockreward reallocation 60-20-20 change to the first hard fork will have been in vain, as DCG will then still run out of funding in December 2023 (unless the Dash price has a considerable increase).

I do find it strange that many devs according Sam will leave the project then, eventhough the Treasury is already approved by a masternodes majority to expand from 10% to 20% of the blockrewards. It is just the timing that is getting a bit complicated now (having to activate a hard fork that depends on broad miner support in pretty much 1 month / 5 weeks).

 

[GrandMasterDash]

Maybe this timeline (and others) should be on the dash website?

 

[xkcd]

This is an interesting thread.

 

[VONCAN]

Maybe this timeline (and others) should be on the dash website?

That would be cool, and I think it would be helpful to see a more complete history in Dash Docs.

But my research so far isn't quite complete, I couldn't figure out why the evan plan wasn't fully implemented after the Dash DAO was created. No one really remembers it much anymore, and somehow I didn't come across it in the media either, and it's pretty hard to search without knowing what.

Here you can see that after February 8, 2016, there should have been a shift in the block reward towards masternodes, but in fact, until 2020, as I understand it, the reward was balanced, 45% 45% 10%.

 

[GrandMasterDash]

Evan's plan was very ambitious and exciting, but at the same time the dash dao was, imo, very ineffective at managing risk-reward... still is. 99% of all projects funded by the dash dao are no longer around.

Regarding block rewards, dunno.