It sounds inflexible when we're used to pairing everything with the dollar but really it's just the same as the economologists idea of linking to a basket of currencies for stability, you're creating a web of pairings rather than a central hub so when you try to move one it moves all the others around it, and so the ones around those, etc. Except with the economologists way of thinking you've got lots of currencies with Keynesian economics trying to dictate their value on one side of the equation and the market trying to decide their value on the other... kaboom! :/
It's not necessarily a means of allowing the market to decide value either, you can create a contract to sell a coat for 10 Dash, receive a contract requiring 0.01 bitcoin to pay a toll and allow passage, offer a ton of coal in an underground seam as a store of value at whatever the market deems a fair rate in contracts for silver in a trusted vault with storage fees reducing their value over time... and so on and so on, the contracts specify the routing requirements and the network does the routing. Not simple to design that kind of complexity from zero but it can evolve from a relatively simple system, something like selling simple goods and services for Dash then allowing more direct routes with Dash maintaining the balance, contracts for other cryptos, contracts for fiat, etc. etc.
EDIT: Including contracts for future goods and services, leases, whatever. Its up to the user to decide if they want to accept them as value, the market might say they do but markets have some funny ideas sometimes :/ Good luck with the drive. 550 miles... ouch.
EDIT2: Just been watching the Anarchapulco vid (great job
) and the same thought was expressed, a barter system is too complicated so you need a base unit of exchange, a default money. The same thing would have been said about the Dash network in the past, you can't manage massive amounts of transactions in a decentralised manner, you can only do it with a centralised system.
Consider that group of starlings again, thousands of birds working as a single unit and they do it in a very similar manner to the masternode quorums, each bird is only aware of 6 or 7 birds around it and that allows simple messages to pass through a group of almost unlimited size extremely quickly and efficiently. Now, instead of movements as the messages you pass metadata, "coat", "Dash", "USD" , "beer" and positive/negative values for each, you can very quickly pool them and their pair and from there create paths between them. Frankly I don't know enough about networking to go beyond that but Dash has some some finely tuned minds with an intimate understanding of that kind of networking.
It's not necessarily a means of allowing the market to decide value either, you can create a contract to sell a coat for 10 Dash, receive a contract requiring 0.01 bitcoin to pay a toll and allow passage, offer a ton of coal in an underground seam as a store of value at whatever the market deems a fair rate in contracts for silver in a trusted vault with storage fees reducing their value over time... and so on and so on, the contracts specify the routing requirements and the network does the routing. Not simple to design that kind of complexity from zero but it can evolve from a relatively simple system, something like selling simple goods and services for Dash then allowing more direct routes with Dash maintaining the balance, contracts for other cryptos, contracts for fiat, etc. etc.
EDIT: Including contracts for future goods and services, leases, whatever. Its up to the user to decide if they want to accept them as value, the market might say they do but markets have some funny ideas sometimes :/ Good luck with the drive. 550 miles... ouch.
EDIT2: Just been watching the Anarchapulco vid (great job
Consider that group of starlings again, thousands of birds working as a single unit and they do it in a very similar manner to the masternode quorums, each bird is only aware of 6 or 7 birds around it and that allows simple messages to pass through a group of almost unlimited size extremely quickly and efficiently. Now, instead of movements as the messages you pass metadata, "coat", "Dash", "USD" , "beer" and positive/negative values for each, you can very quickly pool them and their pair and from there create paths between them. Frankly I don't know enough about networking to go beyond that but Dash has some some finely tuned minds with an intimate understanding of that kind of networking.
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