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Temporary Measures / Quick Wins

I got the impression from Ryan's presentation that we already have too many masternodes. Therefore...

1. Do we currently have too many masternodes and do we know the optimal number?

2. If we have too many, what can we do to lower or cap this number?

2a. Can we increase the number Dash required for a MN?

2b. Can we change the protocol to disallow new MN registrations if there are already x masternodes in the current list?
 
We need a automatic lockin to a stable USD and Euro coins for Merchants in the DASH wallet

I feel the quickest possible improvement to DASH is to provide an option for automatic lock in for USDT and Euros (Statis) in the DASH wallet. Merchants need to have a store of value that does not vary in price. Dash is used for the transaction but the merchant has the option to lock in his earnings to either USD or Euro equivalent. I think we should charge a 1 or 2% fee for this service which and the earnings go to the DIFF. This is competitive to Visa. Merchants need to do accounts for payment of taxes and for purchase of goods they need to have a fixed earnings. Unless DASH is stored instantly in a some form of stable asset then it is practically useless for merchants outside of hyperinflation countries.

Projects are now building in stable coins e.g. Binance is developing their own stable coin. Omisigo is building in Maker Dai. We need either our own stable coin or we need to use an existing stable coin for merchants. If we do not do this we will be simply overtaken by coins that do offer this service.

We have a good relationship with uphold. I know we have a link to open an uphold account but perhaps we can build on this in the DASH wallet to incorporate a balance in Euro and Balance in USD and Euro directly in the wallet without having to log into upload?

Basic Training for Merchants
The other thing which desperately missing are educational videos showing a online merchant how to setup their website to accept DASH payments. There is absolutely nothing I can see on the Dash youtube channel on this. They need to know how to set it up, how to ensure security, how it would work, what the benefits are for their business over accepting credit cards, how to ensure to meet legislation etc. These are the absolute basic training we must have. I find it unbelievable that we are talking about marketing but haven't even got basic video training to show merchants how to setup to start using DASH. They are not going to spend the time to try and work it out for themselves. Someone at DCG needs to provide this basic training program for merchants.
 
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I got the impression from Ryan's presentation that we already have too many masternodes. Therefore...

1. Do we currently have too many masternodes and do we know the optimal number?

2. If we have too many, what can we do to lower or cap this number?

2a. Can we increase the number Dash required for a MN?

2b. Can we change the protocol to disallow new MN registrations if there are already x masternodes in the current list?
I would say we have "more than we need" but there is little downside to having more than we need. The biggest downside is that the network becomes slightly less scalable and slightly slower the larger it gets. However, the effert is logarithmic rather than linear. This means the impact is pretty limited, and at our current transaction counts this is not an issue that keeps me up at night. So while I eluded to the effect in my presentation, I wouldn't read into that to say reducing the number of MNs needs to be a goal. I think they can be allowed to grow in number quite safely. What I wouldn't do is reduce the MN collateral requirement to intentionally make more, which is something many community members had suggested in the past. Hope that clarifies my statements, or at least puts them into clearer context.
 
I quote myself - sorry - to remember that the last paragraph was a question (if Ryan considers that the exceptional financial situation can be an incentive for the DIF to consider receiving external resources also exceptionally).

And now @ Ryan Taylor, a new suggestion, and interested in your opinion:

The 3 million tons per day reached in a stress test are, although it sounds very high, only 34 tps ... putting the network to serious performance limits.

A commission of $ 0.01 / $ 0.02 per transaction is initially proposed. The price increase seems totally logical to me.

Now: And why not a progressive one? I give an example:

- $ 0.01 ... for 1digit tx (in $ ... max $ 9.99)
- $ 0.1 ... tx up to 2 digits (max $ 99.99)
- $ 1 ... tx up to 4 digits (max $ 9,999.99)
- $ 10 ... tx over $ 10,000

This would generate intrinsic value for the main asset (the USE of a global technological vanguard payment platform) ... although in the future, for example, a stable coin - or more, like digital gold ounces - would be used ... with respect to which the figures would be extrapolated. (REAL AND CURRENT Adoption - "Whatever runs on DASH ... we are the best in our work. Today" -)

(The main asset of DASH as a service, workforce and gasoline / heart of the ecosystem ... independent of volatility of the transferred capital).

The objectives of expansion / adoption could be raised with more realistic levels ... and still really competitive, unrivaled, in sectors such as remittances, etc. This would lead to less frustration and much healthier and slower growth (based on absolute efficiency, security, speed ). And they would give enormous value to the possession of the main asset ... even for shared Mnodes without voting rights.
Miner economics don't really work that way... the "cost" of a transaction to any Bitcoin-based network is the size of the data needing processing and storing. If you price Dash transactions in another way (e.g., as a % of the transaction), then other networks could underprice Dash fees, especially on the larger transaction values, which would deter the most valuable high-volume users from using the network. There may be a time in the future where the value of Dash's network (e.g., the number of services integrated and a high acceptance rate) would enable us to price that way, but in the early stages I think it is better to have attractive transaction fees to help with growth.
 
If

If we moved to a system that simply deducted approved budgets from the block reward for the following month, the coin supply would be fully utilized either for budget or provided to MNs and miners. In other words, if we did away with the 10% allocation and allowed that to flex and directed everything else toward mining / MNs, that would solve the issue of "rollover" because it wouldn't go "unused".

That would be an improvement and I would support it. We should still define what will happen to the previously unallocated funds from the current system. Its about 60,000 dash!
 
When I see the price of DASH mooning again, it makes all of these discussions seem rather silly. Only a few weeks ago we were gonna blow it all up!

The market gonna do what the market gonna do. Crypto be crypto. DASH will have its day in the sun again.

Masternodes for the win!
 
That would be an improvement and I would support it. We should still define what will happen to the previously unallocated funds from the current system. Its about 60,000 dash!

You do not understand what happens with unallocated funds. They are simply not created. It is better that they are not created rather than spend on some silly project that will have no impact on adoption.
 
When I see the price of DASH mooning again, it makes all of these discussions seem rather silly. Only a few weeks ago we were gonna blow it all up!

The market gonna do what the market gonna do. Crypto be crypto. DASH will have its day in the sun again.

Masternodes for the win!

I agree. The somewhat desperate machinations from our community members to me indicates we are at or near the bottom.
 
I would like to point out that my post above mentioned USD and Euro stable coins only as a quick fix. What I really want to see for the longer term is a DASH truly stable coin as I wrote about last year (see link below). This would be a new type of Dash specific super stable coin who's price value is linked directly to a basket of 52,000 everyday items / services which are used to calculate the true cost of living. This would ensure the true purchasing power of DASH stable would always remain the same even after 100 years. In this way the DASH stable coin would be more stable than fiat currency that constantly depreciates with time. This would create a demand for DASH stable coin over depreciating USD or Euro or any other Fiat currency that depreciates with time. Indeed even over current so called "Stable coins" that are pegged to depreciating fiat. DASH stable would be truly stable and more stable than all current stable coins. We would use our current DASH coin as the staking coin that is used to generate the production of new DASH stable - similar to how Maker DAI works but instead of Ethereum for staking we use DASH. This would increase the value of DASH transaction coin (our current coin) and provide many advantages over fiat and current stable coins. In order for DASH to replace fiat we need a solution that is more useful than current fiat. The DASH stable coin would be useful in many industries where price volatility over different currencies is a problem e.g. in the Airline industries where one of their main concerns is currency depreciation on sale purchases since they have to deal in many international currencies. The DASH stable coin would also be useful for Pension Programs to retain value over the long term and could attract the Trillions of dollars of pension fund money. I proposed in the article that DASH stable would increase the value of our current coin. Our current coin would be used primarily for transactional purposes but people holding DASH transactional coin will also see value increase in value as it would needed for staking to create DASH stable.

DASH true stable coin
https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/what-dash-needs-to-set-it-above-all-other-cryptos.43036/

This DASH stable coin would work seamlessly with DASH transactional coin in the DASH core wallet and mobile wallets. Merchants can then lock into the DASH Stable coin so that they can maintain their profits and therefore make it suitable for commerce - this would increase the value of DASH transactional coin since it is required to be staked to create DASH stable coin.
 
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The price action shows that dash is a small bird blown in the winds of the larger market, no different than any other coin. Sold off down deep into the town of 26th place on cmc, and now pumped, fully at the mercy of the market. Our treasury system was meant to fund projects that should have prevented such volatility. It shows the ineffectiveness of all the proposals funded over all that time. The only funding that has borne a real ROI has been DCG and Venezuela. All other funds have been given to people and groups that have been largely ineffective.

There still needs to be more scrutiny on proposals, money is still spent too loosely. The parasites are living on easy street, putting in little effort and getting big paychecks. We need more masternode participation to mature the situation. We must incentivize their participation. One would think that with skin in the game they would understand the importance of contributing to the direction of those funds, but apparently the connection is too indirect. We must make treasury spending more directly impactful on the masternodes to bring them to the table.

I propose at the very least we award unspent treasury funds to the masternodes each cycle. With treasury spending directly affecting the masternodes, they will come to the table. Participation will increase, the bar will be raised, and the money will be spent more wisely. Dash will benefit from more effective proposals.
 
DASH Core Group To Consider Changing Its Current Approach And Start To Actively Answer Questions in their funding proposals.

Currently DCG rarely, if ever, answer questions posted in their funding proposals. This tells me that the DCG have little to no real world Sales and Marketing experience. If they did they would know that this is one of the most important ways to increase confidence in the market. I had previously worked formally in Sales and Marketing for 5.5 years but I've also been involved with some form of promotional work for most of my 29 years of professional life in business. What I learned is that questions in a customer's mind lead to doubts. Doubts lead to lack of confidence. Lack of confidence leads to moving to another solution that answers those doubts and questions. Intelligent questions raised in the DCG governance proposals are an absolute golden opportunity for the DCG to build confidence in the Dash project by answering these challenging questions. The only time to ignore questions is if the questions are clearly from a troll just intent on causing damage. Ignoring questions by MNOs that genuinely care about DASH is of a tremendous loss to DASH to build its credibility.

Serious investors do not leave their investment decisions to chance. They have people that thoroughly research a crypto project before making investment. If they are serious about investment they would ensure to check all of the main influences of a project, in our case DCG being one of the most important. It is my opinion that they would be closely looking at DCG proposals and seeing how they respond to questions posted by MNOs. If DCG continue to not respond to intelligent questions this will not only cause doubts in investors minds but it will also cause doubts and mistrust in the community - at least those in the community that are prepared to take the time to formulate these questions.

When I was in Sales my performance really took off when I realised that client objections to a sale are what professional sales people actually want. They want the customer to object and object and object. Professional sales people try actively to elicit the customers objections because these are all blocks in the customer's mind to buying into the solution that the professional sales person has. Instead of seeing questions or objections as a bad thing or something to be afraid of answering, the professional communicator welcomes such questions, objections, doubts and challenging points of view because it offers an opportunity to increase their trust and confidence. Ignoring questions is simply throwing a unique opportunity to increase confidence in the trash can.

With cryptocurreny there are more questions than almost any other field I can think off. This offers us a fantastic opportunity to increase our profile if these questions are answered. The DCG funding proposal is one such place to do this.

One of the reasons that Amanda B. Johnson's Dash Detailed was so successful is that she explained confusing crypto issues in a simple and easy way for anyone to understand. We all know how many people were on-boarded by Amanda's programs. The reason this was successful is because it cleared up doubts, confusion in people's minds.

Other coins that are answering people's questions effectively are BitcoinSV on their coingeek channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC95_Nqes9m5arhoT1lt1SFg

Here they have hundreds of videos which are professionally presented by media trained people that answer the thousands of doubts and questions people have simply through the interviews with respected 3rd party individuals. Although the leaders themselves of the projects answers questions they are also ensure to have others respected people in blockchain interviewed to answer questions for them - this acts like a 3rd party referral for their own coin. The professionalism of these interviews ie. lighting, scripting, consistent branding with music and images etc and the calibre of individuals they interview boosted their coin because they are answering doubts and questions that people naturally have with such a radically new technology such as crypto.

There was a point last year when BSV was half the price of DASH right after the fork for BCH. Now BSV is more than double the price of DASH. That is a 4 times increase. This is considering that Craig Wright is universally disliked within the crypto community and have had almost everyone trying to discredit him. The regular daily interviews from CoinGeek presenters Stephanie Tower, and Becky Liggero who are clearly media trained people present a professional image of the coin and continuously highlight the values of their coin. Their company value messages are repeated over and over in most interviews which are: The claim to Scaling has been solved, they wish to build blockchain that works within the current legal system (this gives businesses confidence in investing in development to build solutions on this coin), they highlight the importance of privacy but not anonymity which will prevent governments and criminals from using their technology fraudulently but allow law-abiding citizens to use their technology, their long term commitment to low fees and not changing their protocol further to ensure new industries or existing industries can build on their chain with confidence. All of these messages and more are coming through loud and clear with the BSV project interviews.

Bearing in mind that Dash's solution is more effective payments solution, has a better brand and considerably more innovative developer team that builds amazingly creative solutions and are focused on payments solution first, yet we have not done anywhere near as well as BSV. We have chainlocks, Masternode network, decentralised governance, instant transaction confirmations, Instant re-spendable money ultra high security, simple easy of use and now (finally) evolution. These are groundbreaking innovative solutions that no other coin has. Yet we see next to nothing about these ingenious creative solutions created by our developer team.

I have heard it said from senior DCG members that they are sure the technology will eventually win through, this however is not necessarily so, as had been demonstrated many times previously in history e.g. Betamax and VHS example.

I feel what is missing from DCG are people that have a proven track record in professional Sales and Marketing and a professional PR firm. We spent a million Dollars on Ben Swan, Over a million Dollars on KuvaCash and Over a Million Dollars on Alt36 - We could easily have had 4 million dollars investing in our own professional PR firm with all the gear to professional represent DASH for years but instead what have we got to show for our investments in these projects? We are throwing away money in useless ventures because we lack real world business understanding within the DCG and the majority of MNOs that are voting. It is not just DCG in this respect MNOs also need to accept they don't have the experience to vote wisely. This is why I feel that MNOs need to acknowledge to themselves if they have the business experience or not and if they don't delegate their voting keys to MNOs that do.

Therefore the quickest fixes for increasing confidence in DASH and therefore attract investors - without overtly promoting DASH as an investment are the following:

1. DCG to start answering questions in their proposals to clear those doubts not just of the questioner but also the hundreds of others that have the same doubts but have not vocalised them.

2. Build educational portal of materials in video format that educate businesses and individuals on how to use DASH

3. Hire or actually buy and own a professional PR media firm that can create daily high quality content such as how BSV are doing on their Coingeek channel. This provides confidence in the project, educates the potential customer base which includes businesses, customers and investors.

4. Highlight the Github coding activity statistics which demonstrates the amount of work we are doing on building and developing our code base.

5. DCG to employ a real world high performance Sales And Marketing person that can bring in this missing expertise into DCG

6. I also feel we need someone that is the Technical lead to represent our coin. I really like Evan Duffield even though he came across a little reserved he was a visionary that gave coherence and confidence to the project on the technical side. Ryan is a good lead for DCG, but he does not have the technical visions that Evan brought to the project.

7. All key members of the Dash Community that are involved with PR or are responsible for interacting with the media really need to be professionally media trained to learn what is necessary to present DASH in the best light. There are courses available on this and I feel a 7 day course on Media Training and PR skills would be a very valuable for best representing DASH for high profile members of the Dash community who have to interact with the media.


8. MNOs that do not have a at least 10 years running a business should consider doing the sensible thing and delegate their voting keys to MNOs that have got business experience to increase the quality of the votes in the governance system. I also mean business experience where they are the business owners - working for someone else means they simply will not have the breadth of experience necessary to consider multiple issues on a business proposal.


These are easy wins that would radically improve the DASH project profile. We may not be able to afford all of the above at this stage but we certainly can make a start by DCG answering questions posted in their funding proposals. Answering questions has a time investment, I understand that, however the return on investment in terms of increasing confidence in the project is well worth that extra time in my opinion.
 
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