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Dash needs new leadership and direction

GrandMasterDash

Well-known member
Masternode Owner/Operator
I barely had the motivation to write this post and I'm not entirely sure why I'm doing it now, other than a remote hope that someone else might actually care. In essence, I have become very disenchanted with the direction dash appears to be taking. Having given this some thought, I've come to the personal opinion that Evan is the wrong person to steer this project, or that dash would benefit from a fork. (I'm not the right person to actually do that)

One of the big problems I have with dash is it's current obsession with fiat gateways at the expense of innovation in other areas. And with instant transactions and fiat so high on the list, ALL dash projects should be concentrating on the mobile experience.

I ask myself, what originally attracted me to cryptocurrencies? And what made me so disenchanted with bitcoin? The answer can be found in the original pillars, including anonymity, decentralisation, distribution and permissionless. Look at those pillars now; fiat gateways became the dominant pattern, stripping us of anonymity and liberty. We're pretty much back to square one and the revolution didn't happen, at least not on the scale we were sold. How can we proclaim the corruption and weakness of fiat yet be so eager to get into bed with it?

I'm going to highlight three examples where dash could be concentrating and innovating it's efforts:

1. Security / centralisation

The masternode network sits on top of public ip's. More than half of those MNs sit on top of just four cloud services. Thus, the price for giving our end users anonymity is that masternode operators are unduly exposed to outside interference.

In fairness, when it comes to anonymity, there are significant technical hurdles to overcome, not least because anonymous layers would probably forgo instant transactions. But more worryingly, to my knowledge, a lot of Evolution is being hard wired to that list of public ip addresses. Thus, the move to an anonymous layer, in part or whole, would be substantial, impossible or unlikely.

There's also no escaping that crypto is a growing force in the shadow economy. For better or worse, crypto is the new tax haven. But it could also be the new way to collect tax and fund services. Does dash have an improved shadow economy on it's roadmap?

2. Governance

It was Evan that pulled off the marketing trick, allowing MNOs to vote for a block size increase; voting for something the core team wanted to do. Would it hold to vote for something they didn't want to do?

But anyway, Evan has this newfangled idea about project based budgets etc. This is what we're reduced to; trial and error. Didn't quite work the first time, let's try something else then rinse and repeat. NO, this is not governance!

Dash's idea of governance is very self-serving and introspective. That's not innovative, it just shows how little we know about governance. What we need is a flexible voting and budgeting system we can rent out to others. A local authority, for example, would maintain their own rules and their own database of voters, but they would outsource the voting and budgeting process to dash. The processes and results of votes and budgets sitting on a blockchain and ensuring anonymity and impartiality. Once this is established, we could create a dash authority, or even a competing dash authority.

And talking of voting and being a disenchanted user, I think our own rulebook should enforce MNO voting for at least 50% of proposals / projects. Additionally, there should be an abstain option. But once again, just to be clear, this voting-budgeting model should not be hard wired but, rather, a process we rent (as described above).

3. Dash Drive

Evolution, quick quick, reserve your unique id before it's taken by someone else. Ugh, once again, another Evan brainwave. A dash username space hard wired for dash. Again, self-serving and short-sighted. The only community this benefits is dash.

Once again, as with governance, the namespace should be rented out, behaving like a simplified dns system. Use the MNs to rent out a key-value search space. Vodafone comes along, they have their own customer database and they rent a block of, say, ten million key-value pairs to the "@vodafone" domain. Vodafone would be responsible for issuing id's (unique or otherwise), sms authentication and so on. Dash would simply provide the management tools. What could be simpler than sending money to someone's telephone number (1234555@vodafone), with some assurance that it would actually go to the right person.

- open to all organisations, big or small
- tiered charging based on api access and duration
- increased income to MNOs.

Conclusion

Did you notice a theme? Evan says, "I have an idea, let's try this...". And, when I think about it, that's pretty much his modus operandi. A good example would be DarkSend... Evan had a good idea of how to solve one particular problem, but later something more interesting things came along - e.g. Evolution, fiat gateways etc - and suddenly privacy is no longer the project's priority. Evan says he holds privacy close to his heart but I disagree, his focus has changed. He's an ideas person.. nothing wrong with that, but our dependency on him makes the project fickle.

On top of this, we have a two year timetable for the full Evolution and I don't see anything substantive regarding anonymity, dns or governance, other than hard wiring and re-wiring it's own rules. Two years is a very long time, leaving it wide open for others to do the stuff we're not.

Dash is not going to change the world by being self-indulgent, it needs to give value to other people and communities. We're clearly not experts in dns or governance so what's all this fluffing about trying to do it ourselves?

For all these reasons, my enthusiasm in dash has waned considerably.

Ideas:
- improved protection to MNOs
- rent out the services we use e.g. governance and key-value pairs
- tax and the shadow economy
- greater coin distribution and availability e.g. create an interchangeable doge-like sister coin
- merge or co-ordinate with other blockchains and projects
- adopt a mobile-apps-only policy
 
...
Ideas:
- improved protection to MNOs
- rent out the services we use e.g. governance and key-value pairs
- tax and the shadow economy
- greater coin distribution and availability e.g. create an interchangeable doge-like sister coin
- merge or co-ordinate with other blockchains and projects
- adopt a mobile-apps-only policy

It's very nice to have ideas, I have tons of them. Many have ideas these days actually. The thing is - nothing ever moved an inch because someone had a brilliant idea, someone had to implement one's idea to get things moving. Even bitcoin had to be implemented in code by Satoshi himself. And note, he even wrote a paper describing his idea and provided a general explanation how this could be implemented - no one really cared back in 2008 - "ah, yet another fancy nerd money idea, this will never work because ...". If you think that focus has changed and you don't like it and you have an idea how to fix/improve something - submit a PR implementing your ideas to shift focus back. Or hire someone to do this for you.
 
Honestly, the "fork it" and "do it yourself" arguments are tiring, to say the least. Doesn't anyone here actually know how predictable and lame those kind of responses are? Go ahead, continue to shoot down anyone and everyone that posts in a general forum without the time or resources to do it themselves. Better still, put a massive banner at the top saying, "Only post if you're going to do it yourself. We only accept people of action". And I guess that's why people turn into zombie money grabbers who's only interest in running a MN is to get free money. Suck it 'til it's dry and move on. Okay, fine, have it that way.
 
Honestly, the "fork it" and "do it yourself" arguments are tiring, to say the least..

So are bucket loads of great ideas. And we've been having bucket loads of buckets lately.

The thing is, most people don't understand that sometimes a "simple" idea can be a nightmare to implement, and really mind-boggling concepts are really just 2 line code fix. Let alone the development roadmap put in place.


.
 
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Honestly, the "fork it" and "do it yourself" arguments are tiring, to say the least. Doesn't anyone here actually know how predictable and lame those kind of responses are? Go ahead, continue to shoot down anyone and everyone that posts in a general forum without the time or resources to do it themselves. Better still, put a massive banner at the top saying, "Only post if you're going to do it yourself. We only accept people of action". And I guess that's why people turn into zombie money grabbers who's only interest in running a MN is to get free money. Suck it 'til it's dry and move on. Okay, fine, have it that way.


This 100% this.
 
Yes, it's a real problem that most members of the community can help the project only with "ideas" (of course, contradicting each other). :(
 
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Honestly, the "fork it" and "do it yourself" arguments are tiring, to say the least. Doesn't anyone here actually know how predictable and lame those kind of responses are? Go ahead, continue to shoot down anyone and everyone that posts in a general forum without the time or resources to do it themselves. Better still, put a massive banner at the top saying, "Only post if you're going to do it yourself. We only accept people of action". And I guess that's why people turn into zombie money grabbers who's only interest in running a MN is to get free money. Suck it 'til it's dry and move on. Okay, fine, have it that way.
I'm not shooting anyone, please feel free to post anything you think worth to be posted (as long as it's not a spam or throwing mud at someone), there is not a word in my post that says otherwise. I'm just saying that throwing ideas in the air doesn't really help too much. Everyone can do this. Do some actual work - code, promote, educate people about Dash, start your business and accept Dash as a payment, organize people to implement stuff you want, write a proposal to implement it and ask MNs for a support, whatever else but talks.

Yes, it's a real problem that most members of the community can help the project only with "ideas" (of course, contradicting each other). :(
Ideas themselves are fine imo, endless talks like "would be nice to have feature X but I want someone else to take care about it" - that's the real problem. You want smth to be real - do something to make it real. It won't magically appear out of nowhere just because someone mentioned it 100 times.
 
I'm not shooting anyone, please feel free to post anything you think worth to be posted (as long as it's not a spam or throwing mud at someone), there is not a word in my post that says otherwise. I'm just saying that throwing ideas in the air doesn't really help too much. Everyone can do this. Do some actual work - code, promote, educate people about Dash, start your business and accept Dash as a payment, organize people to implement stuff you want, write a proposal to implement it and ask MNs for a support, whatever else but talks.

Ideas themselves are fine imo, endless talks like "would be nice to have feature X but I want someone else to take care about it" - that's the real problem. You want smth to be real - do something to make it real. It won't magically appear out of nowhere just because someone mentioned it 100 times.

That there, imo, is a contradiction. You're not shooting anyone down, but you don't want to hear endless talk from people unless they can do something real. What do you know about my - or anyone elses - circumstances? - nothing. As it goes, I once came close to building a small dash only project without ever wanting funding, but the mentality here was the biggest reason I walked away from it.

People coming together with "useless" ideas is like the thousands of people entering talent shows. Most are not up to the job but it wouldn't be the same without them. But yeah, let's ridicule them for participating.

You do know this is a "general" forum? Sorry, I should of posted to a technical forum just so I could of been lambasted harder.
 
How about rephrasing the idea with...

"What would it take, in terms of man-power and time, to implement (insert idea) ... And will it somehow clash with current development roadmap? "

"If it does clash, what in the devs and community's opinion are the pro's and con's of (insert idea) ?"

Just an idea.

.
 
How about rephrasing the idea with...

"What would it take, in terms of man-power and time, to implement (insert idea) ... And will it somehow clash with current development roadmap? "

"If it does clash, what in the devs and community's opinion are the pro's and con's of (insert idea) ?"

Just an idea.

.

/bow

You didn't pull out your inner troll for once! /clap
 
How about rephrasing the idea with...

"What would it take, in terms of man-power and time, to implement (insert idea) ... And will it somehow clash with current development roadmap? "

"If it does clash, what in the devs and community's opinion are the pro's and con's of (insert idea) ?"

.

...because I had previously posed some of those questions on separate threads. This thread was part amalgamation and expressing discontent rather than looking for solutions.
 
That there, imo, is a contradiction. You're not shooting anyone down, but you don't want to hear endless talk from people unless they can do something real. What do you know about my - or anyone elses - circumstances? - nothing. As it goes, I once came close to building a small dash only project without ever wanting funding, but the mentality here was the biggest reason I walked away from it.

People coming together with "useless" ideas is like the thousands of people entering talent shows. Most are not up to the job but it wouldn't be the same without them. But yeah, let's ridicule them for participating.

You do know this is a "general" forum? Sorry, I should of posted to a technical forum just so I could of been lambasted harder.
Sorry, either I'm bad at explaining things or you are making assumptions which are not based on my post but rather on your interpretation of it.
I never said I don't want to hear ideas, I said "please feel free to post anything you think worth to be posted" and "Ideas themselves are fine".
I simply encourage everyone to do smth rather than to post same ideas over and over.

Anyway, let's go through that list you mentioned in the first post:

- improved protection to MNOs

this was already discussed before, not much can be done here without disrupting network, hardly possible if possible at all

- rent out the services we use e.g. governance and key-value pairs

cool, find someone who needs this

- tax and the shadow economy

what exactly do we need to do?

- greater coin distribution and availability e.g. create an interchangeable doge-like sister coin
rrright, so now we need to secure 2 networks at once.. not a great idea imo

- merge or co-ordinate with other blockchains and projects

cool, find someone who needs this

- adopt a mobile-apps-only policy

err, why?
 
I barely had the motivation to write this post and I'm not entirely sure why I'm doing it now, other than a remote hope that someone else might actually care. In essence, I have become very disenchanted with the direction dash appears to be taking. Having given this some thought, I've come to the personal opinion that Evan is the wrong person to steer this project, or that dash would benefit from a fork. (I'm not the right person to actually do that)
....
I think you are can't see the forest for the trees... Evolution is all about privacy, instant transactions, security and decentralisation. But there is entire process to get to there (and it is just the beginning).

You criticize fiat gateways focus... in my opinion you are simply not able to see the strategic value of this project.
Without fiat gateways Dash will remain a toy for geeks. We could build 100 new, shiny technologies but if Dash won't be easily available and exchangeable to ordinary people it will useless (ordinary people simply have fiats not Dash in their wallets and accounts).
So yes, it is important to have this focus (and it is not forever). But if you think that it is the only focus (obsession), you are wrong. Read this carefully: https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/april-2016-dash-core-team-monthly-report.8913/
 
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I think you are can't see the forest for the trees... Evolution is all about privacy, instant transactions, security and decentralisation. But there is entire process to get to there (and it is just the beginning).

You criticize fiat gateways focus... in my opinion you are simply not able to see the strategic value of this project.
Without fiat gateways Dash will stay a toy for geeks. We could build 100 new, shiny technologies but if Dash won't be easily available and exchangeable to ordinary people it will useless (ordinary people simply have fiats not Dash in their wallets and accounts).

So yes, it is important to have this focus (and it is not forever). But if you think that it is the only focus (obsession), you are wrong. Read this carefully: https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/april-2016-dash-core-team-monthly-report.8913/


Fiat gateways makes you more geeks than you are. Not only geeks, but also greedy geeks. But this is NOT the kind of persons dash coin needs.

Unfortunately , as long as the majority of the core team and of the masternode owners are greedy geeks, by their actions they also invite this kind of people. People who want to earn fast fiat money, whithout carring about dash's future. This mentality leads dash coin directly into the cliff, into the recycle bin of history.

What dash needs is to create a separate ECONOMY, to attract people who want to make transactions directly in dash, and this can be done by issuing the basic income concept. It is a strategic error, dash coin to become a coin that depends on fiat. Fiat is the good money, and dash is the bad. The bad money always wins the good, because people want to get rid of it. So if we give dash to people, and dash has an exchange rate with fiat, but people cannot easily find places to exchange it, then in order to get rid of the bad dash money, they will start making transactions. And transactions's result will be dash to win fiat, the same way fiat won gold.

So the exact opposite of what you propose is the correct strategy. Reduce the chances dash to be converted to fiat (means reduce fiat gateways). Give a basic income and a universal dividend , and try to keep a good exchange rate with fiat money, so that transactions with dash coin to start occuring (because dash is the "bad" money, so people wants to get rid of it). If people starts making transactions directly to dash, this is the end of fiat, and dash is the winner, the coin of the future. Fiat was once the "bad" money comparing to gold and silver, and now is the winner, so lets do to fiat what fiat did to gold and silver.
 
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I don't think there's any reason why all of these things can't happen simultaneously. If there are even just a few people who want to start a project or dedicate resources to advance some of those ideas, they can and should do so (maybe even get masternode funding), and it doesn't necessarily have to involve splitting off into a separate community.
 
I barely had the motivation to write this post and I'm not entirely sure why I'm doing it now, other than a remote hope that someone else might actually care. In essence, I have become very disenchanted with the direction dash appears to be taking. Having given this some thought, I've come to the personal opinion that Evan is the wrong person to steer this project, or that dash would benefit from a fork. (I'm not the right person to actually do that)

One of the big problems I have with dash is it's current obsession with fiat gateways at the expense of innovation in other areas. And with instant transactions and fiat so high on the list, ALL dash projects should be concentrating on the mobile experience.

I ask myself, what originally attracted me to cryptocurrencies? And what made me so disenchanted with bitcoin? The answer can be found in the original pillars, including anonymity, decentralisation, distribution and permissionless. Look at those pillars now; fiat gateways became the dominant pattern, stripping us of anonymity and liberty. We're pretty much back to square one and the revolution didn't happen, at least not on the scale we were sold. How can we proclaim the corruption and weakness of fiat yet be so eager to get into bed with it?

I'm going to highlight three examples where dash could be concentrating and innovating it's efforts:

1. Security / centralisation

The masternode network sits on top of public ip's. More than half of those MNs sit on top of just four cloud services. Thus, the price for giving our end users anonymity is that masternode operators are unduly exposed to outside interference.

In fairness, when it comes to anonymity, there are significant technical hurdles to overcome, not least because anonymous layers would probably forgo instant transactions. But more worryingly, to my knowledge, a lot of Evolution is being hard wired to that list of public ip addresses. Thus, the move to an anonymous layer, in part or whole, would be substantial, impossible or unlikely.

There's also no escaping that crypto is a growing force in the shadow economy. For better or worse, crypto is the new tax haven. But it could also be the new way to collect tax and fund services. Does dash have an improved shadow economy on it's roadmap?

2. Governance

It was Evan that pulled off the marketing trick, allowing MNOs to vote for a block size increase; voting for something the core team wanted to do. Would it hold to vote for something they didn't want to do?

But anyway, Evan has this newfangled idea about project based budgets etc. This is what we're reduced to; trial and error. Didn't quite work the first time, let's try something else then rinse and repeat. NO, this is not governance!

Dash's idea of governance is very self-serving and introspective. That's not innovative, it just shows how little we know about governance. What we need is a flexible voting and budgeting system we can rent out to others. A local authority, for example, would maintain their own rules and their own database of voters, but they would outsource the voting and budgeting process to dash. The processes and results of votes and budgets sitting on a blockchain and ensuring anonymity and impartiality. Once this is established, we could create a dash authority, or even a competing dash authority.

And talking of voting and being a disenchanted user, I think our own rulebook should enforce MNO voting for at least 50% of proposals / projects. Additionally, there should be an abstain option. But once again, just to be clear, this voting-budgeting model should not be hard wired but, rather, a process we rent (as described above).

3. Dash Drive

Evolution, quick quick, reserve your unique id before it's taken by someone else. Ugh, once again, another Evan brainwave. A dash username space hard wired for dash. Again, self-serving and short-sighted. The only community this benefits is dash.

Once again, as with governance, the namespace should be rented out, behaving like a simplified dns system. Use the MNs to rent out a key-value search space. Vodafone comes along, they have their own customer database and they rent a block of, say, ten million key-value pairs to the "@vodafone" domain. Vodafone would be responsible for issuing id's (unique or otherwise), sms authentication and so on. Dash would simply provide the management tools. What could be simpler than sending money to someone's telephone number (1234555@vodafone), with some assurance that it would actually go to the right person.

- open to all organisations, big or small
- tiered charging based on api access and duration
- increased income to MNOs.

Conclusion

Did you notice a theme? Evan says, "I have an idea, let's try this...". And, when I think about it, that's pretty much his modus operandi. A good example would be DarkSend... Evan had a good idea of how to solve one particular problem, but later something more interesting things came along - e.g. Evolution, fiat gateways etc - and suddenly privacy is no longer the project's priority. Evan says he holds privacy close to his heart but I disagree, his focus has changed. He's an ideas person.. nothing wrong with that, but our dependency on him makes the project fickle.

On top of this, we have a two year timetable for the full Evolution and I don't see anything substantive regarding anonymity, dns or governance, other than hard wiring and re-wiring it's own rules. Two years is a very long time, leaving it wide open for others to do the stuff we're not.

Dash is not going to change the world by being self-indulgent, it needs to give value to other people and communities. We're clearly not experts in dns or governance so what's all this fluffing about trying to do it ourselves?

For all these reasons, my enthusiasm in dash has waned considerably.

Ideas:
- improved protection to MNOs
- rent out the services we use e.g. governance and key-value pairs
- tax and the shadow economy
- greater coin distribution and availability e.g. create an interchangeable doge-like sister coin
- merge or co-ordinate with other blockchains and projects
- adopt a mobile-apps-only policy

Thank you for your post, @GrandMasterDash. I think you bring up some legitimate and intriguing points, even if I don't agree with them all. I also appreciate your sincerity and respectfulness in your criticisms. It is a sign of a healthy community that such criticisms happen and are taken seriously.

I understand it is frustrating to hear "just fork the code," but that really is the solution in this case. There are two ways to create a better crypto:

1) Create your own coin (either from scratch or by forking an existing coin).
2) Influence the direction of an existing coin (which you are trying to do here).

Dash is probably the most open to option #2; after all, we've seen how hard it is to influence Bitcoin (even Gavin can't!), and other coins are basically one-man shows with no governance structure. With Dash there is at least the possibility of truly influencing its direction.

However, Dash is the creation of Evan and until he has taken a serious misstep or he drops out, he is going to set the direction of Dash. So far, Dash has moved forward and is on a road to success (although there are many types of "successful" cryptos!). Of course, Sentinel or Evolution or whatever the next idea is might fail miserably, but until that time, I think it unlikely that the majority of MNs will go against Evan in any significant way. He has earned that confidence by past ideas and actions.

The real problem is that to make great ideas happen you need two things: (1) a great idea; and (2) a way to implement it. Most of us can only do one - we either can think of great ideas but can't implement them, or we don't really have great ideas but could implement them if we were told what to do. (And some of us can't do either!) So you usually need at least two people - an idea person and an implementation person to see it through to success. Every once in a while someone like Satoshi comes along who can do both well (its rarity is why some think Satoshi is a team, not one man). Evan is that type - both ideas and implementation. That doesn't mean all the ideas are great or that the implementations are always flawless, just that he has the ability to attempt both.

For now, Dash will sink or swim with Evan. But the beauty of open-source code is that even if it fails - or fails to address certain features - it can always be forked and improved by others.
 
Agree, fork it means "fuck off"!

Instead of fork, we can also vote.
Fortunately, vote is not always in bad direction.
Fortunately, Mastenode Owners rejected fiat gateways, and this is a correct decision.

I said before:
Unfortunately , as long as the majority of the core team and of the masternode owners are greedy geeks, by their actions they also invite this kind of people. People who want to earn fast fiat money, whithout carring about dash's future. This mentality leads dash coin directly into the cliff, into the recycle bin of history.
...and I dont get my quote back.
I still consider the majority of masternode owners as greedy geeks, but the one who owns 360 masternodes is not. :)
 
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I believe in Evan. I take that leap of faith. Everyone has a right to express themselves and have adult conversations about their issue/feelings.
Lets have a vote, it will only tell us that we are behind Evan otherwise we would have just voted with our feet, moved on and changed camps.
 
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