Can you think of a project to fund ?

[Icebucket]

How about unused coins would go to faucet on the new official site to stimulate people to check out the site and paper wallets that are distributed at conferences something like 5 dash per paperwallet. try that out for a couple of months. Might amount be to large sum to do for longer than that.

 

[Sub-Ether]

I think it would be nice to spend some coins on a thorough audit of the code, security audit, maybe put up a bounty for breaking DarkSend. I know these ideas aren't new, and have already been discussed somewhere on this forum. I just want to bring them up again because I think an audit would be a good idea. Kristov Atlas did a great job last year but maybe let's hire a reputable security company this time. It should add more prestige to our project and let us sleep easier
Such security audit has an additional benefit. It would give us something to counter some of these ridicules accusations made by trolls.

Cant see the point in a security test if the code is being rewritten to the protocol level, better to wait until sections of Evolution are finished and perhaps offer incentive bounties for the breaking the revised code as it is released and tested.

 

[the-baker]

Cant see the point in a security test if the code is being rewritten to the protocol level, better to wait until sections of Evolution are finished and perhaps offer incentive bounties for the breaking the revised code as it is released and tested.

Well, you know what they say: Security is a process. The next refactoring is always right around the corner, so if you want to wait for that, you'll never do the audit. The point is that a) the code is in the wild & used by a number of people and b) the funds we're talking about expire in less than 30 days. So if the alternative would be just to burn them, why not make a bounty from them?

 

[stan.distortion]

We only seem to be looking at funds from a hand-to-mouth perspective and not from the perspective of putting something into a budget each month until it accumulates enough for a major undertaking, saving up enough for a top of the line security review by a brand name company (does such a thing exist?) would be both testing and PR.

 

[David]

As I have said previously in many other threads, apart from the dev team getting their cut, the ENTIRE budget needs to be expended on marketing and PR activities for at least the next 3-6 months. You look at the largest companies who even sell shonky stuff but rake in the cash...why....because their budgets are spent on marketing and PR.....We have an amazing product and its time to get serious with marketing as this is where Dash is severely lacking. I think there is so many fronts to attack and there is more work to do in this space than even coding of the new evolution system. It seems as though there is some secret work going on in the back end but we need to allocate as much budget as we can.

I feel as though we have plateaued with the number of investors and users and this is a great time to enter as an investor with evolution on the horizon but most people dont even know about Dash. I bet you put a poll on the main BTC forum and everyone will either have a negative opinion based on 9-12 month old information (closed source, trusted masternodes, reference nodes) or they have never heard of it. Dont even get me started on normal every day users, we are well outside of their reach at this time.

Edit: Look at this for reference and see which points Dash is currently excelling at....product development....the rest...not so much.

I agree in principle, but I think the time is not yet right for that. Dash Evolution is looking to be such a huge, radical paradigm shift in our project (and in crypto in general) that I would wait until after its released to make really big PR waves.

If it was up to me, I'd suggest something along the lines of 50% for development (core team plus other development-related projects), 25% to future PR/marketing, and 25% to current PR/marketing. I definitely think we need to continue marketing right now, but I think the big shift (like 25% to development and 75% to marketing) should be made AFTER Evolution is released.

Just using rough numbers, here is what I suggest:

Current:
Development: $10,000 per month
PR: $5,000 per month
Future PR Fund: $5,000 per month

Future (after Evolution is released and stable):
Development: $5,000 per month
PR: $15,000 per month

Let's assume (based on other major releases from the past) that it takes an additional four months from today to launch Evolution and get it stable on mainnet:

Four months of savings @ $5,000 per month = $20,000
First month post-Evolution PR budget = $15,000
Total to invest in PR blitz upon Evolution's release = $35,000

That would be a nice figure to work with, I think. Then, instead of saying "We have a really cool coin with lots of future potential" we can say "We have revolutionized digital money. Here's Dash Evolution."

 

[stan.distortion]

+1, imo splitting as percentages rather than fixed figures makes more sense too.

 

[jpr]

I think it would be nice to spend some coins on a thorough audit of the code, security audit, maybe put up a bounty for breaking DarkSend. I know these ideas aren't new, and have already been discussed somewhere on this forum. I just want to bring them up again because I think an audit would be a good idea. Kristov Atlas did a great job last year but maybe let's hire a reputable security company this time. It should add more prestige to our project and let us sleep easier

Such security audit has an additional benefit. It would give us something to counter some of these ridicules accusations made by trolls.

Why wasting money on breaking Darksend if there will be no darksend in the evolution thing? Didn't Evan said something like that?
I can't imagine instantly anonymous coins and slow-as-fuck-mixing at the same time? Are we talking about the same coin?

 

[jpr]

I'd like to see 2FA suport, such as Trezor or google Auth, on the core wallet.

Seems like this feature would be a win for everyone.

Pablo.

2FA was planned some time ago. Anyone knows what happened to that? I also would like to see that in the core wallet.

 

[AnarchicCluster]

Why wasting money on breaking Darksend if there will be no darksend in the evolution thing? Didn't Evan said something like that?
I can't imagine instantly anonymous coins and slow-as-fuck-mixing at the same time? Are we talking about the same coin?

You are right. I'm not saying that we have to do the audit right now, but I think it would be good to do it at some point in the near future. Maybe When the dust settles after launching evolution we can start thinking about the audit

 

[David]

You are right. I'm not saying that we have to do the audit right now, but I think it would be good to do it at some point in the near future. Maybe When the dust settles after launching evolution we can start thinking about the audit

I think a post-Evolution audit is an excellent idea

 

[bhkien]

There are so many interesting things need to be funded. But I think we should fund for something that can add more value to the ecosystem of Dash but doesn't require us to wait so long.

A website like Localbitcoins.com for Dash does not cost much and very soon to have.

 

[oaxaca]

There are so many interesting things need to be funded. But I think we should fund for something that can add more value to the ecosystem of Dash but doesn't require us to wait so long.

A website like Localbitcoins.com for Dash does not cost much and very soon to have.

How about a decentralized P2P exchange? Coinffeine is shutting down, but the code still lives at
https://github.com/Coinffeine/coinffeine

It's based on the Bitcoin protocol, can somebody ( kot ) ask around and see how much effort would be required to "upgrade" the software to be DASH-centric?

 

[fible1]

We should also start thinking about what we want to build on top of Dash after Evolution is released.

Pablo.

 

[bhkien]

How about a decentralized P2P exchange? Coinffeine is shutting down, but the code still lives at
https://github.com/Coinffeine/coinffeine

It's based on the Bitcoin protocol, can somebody ( https://dashtalk.org/members/3244/ ) ask around and see how much effort would be required to "upgrade" the software to be DASH-centric?

Yeah! That's an important thing we need, but I think it takes longer time to finish. If we can complete some small steps first people may have more confident to invest into the Dash.

 

[oaxaca]

Yeah! That's an important thing we need, but I think it takes longer time to finish. If we can complete some small steps first people may have more confident to invest into the Dash.

True, but the Coinffeine code is open source and 95% of the way there. Probably wouldn't take much effort to DASHify it.

 

[Bridgewater]

I personally feel the money allocated to marketing & PR should be transparent.

This is something that has had me thinking for a while now. Not the "many hands" principle you guys were talking about, but rather the aspect of a small group of people being privy to sensitive information that can potentially have a big effect on the Dash price, and hence, their own investment.

I remember back in 2012-2013 I did some BTC trading based on scouring the news for really positive or really negative press, and if I caught it quickly, I was able to make money on the price swings that were obviously tied to public reaction to the news. Since those news-based price swings for bitcoin (at least back then) were so predictable, it was always my suspicion that the traders who stood to make the most profit were the people with their fingers on the news release buttons themselves.

This value itself (knowledge of what will be released and exactly when) could be worth at least as much as the expenses that the PR budget funds. I am not saying this is really a bad thing, just that we are in an interesting situation where private work gets paid for through decentralized community funds. Ultimately, the dev team and PR/marketing team are still going to be in a better position to make strategic investments than people NOT working on these things (including the majority of MN holders/voters). I think this is also the reason why the budget proposals are still modest subsidies to pay only for external expenses, and not the entirety of the hard work, inspiration and man-hours spent on the project. The latter part is what actually deserves the "insider information," IMO. This is similar to the "founders holding many coins having incentive to continue the project" principle.

I'll use raganius' Tennis promotion as an example: We can assume he owned at least some Dash at the time of his promotion, and he took a risk with an effort to get the word out about the project he was invested in, and he (along with the rest of us) would be rewarded if the price went up as a result of that effort. If in the short term the price did not go up and he did not make back his marketing expenses as a result, then that's where the PR/marketing budget comes in, because it is designed for the long-term image of the project. Although I originally objected to the idea of "retroactive funding," I had no problem voting YES for his budget after checking my premise to what the PR/marketing budgets are actually for, and I viewed it as more of a safety net that allowed someone to take more of a risk--one that I supported because his motive and actions (although not financially provable, at least in the short-term) were good for the long-term vision of the currency.

 

[GrandMasterDash]

Here's how I see it, there are two major things playing on people's mind; fiat exchanges and PR / marketing. Although important to some degree, I think we should not be so concerned with either of these and here's why...

If you look at how the bitcoin exchanges work, they basically break the two major selling points for using bitcoin in the first place; near-flat fee structures and permissionless payments (requiring AML / KYC). Where are we going to be if we copy this model? Let's not forget, dash's main features is to be fast and to keep transactions / history anonymous.

And I also agree with others here, that PR / marketing should not be wasted on unfinished products. We don't even have a mobile app that competes with Mycelium for bitcoin. And great as it is, in my mind, Mycelium has become stagnant. We can do so much better than that.

What we need is our own economy that provides the most distribution and churn. We need good low level use cases such as gaming and messaging that allows for spread and flow. This would reduce our reliance on centralised exchanges and equally give us the best type of marketing... word of mouth.

 

[David]

This is something that has had me thinking for a while now. Not the "many hands" principle you guys were talking about, but rather the aspect of a small group of people being privy to sensitive information that can potentially have a big effect on the Dash price, and hence, their own investment.

I remember back in 2012-2013 I did some BTC trading based on scouring the news for really positive or really negative press, and if I caught it quickly, I was able to make money on the price swings that were obviously tied to public reaction to the news. Since those news-based price swings for bitcoin (at least back then) were so predictable, it was always my suspicion that the traders who stood to make the most profit were the people with their fingers on the news release buttons themselves.

This value itself (knowledge of what will be released and exactly when) could be worth at least as much as the expenses that the PR budget funds. I am not saying this is really a bad thing, just that we are in an interesting situation where private work gets paid for through decentralized community funds. Ultimately, the dev team and PR/marketing team are still going to be in a better position to make strategic investments than people NOT working on these things (including the majority of MN holders/voters). I think this is also the reason why the budget proposals are still modest subsidies to pay only for external expenses, and not the entirety of the hard work, inspiration and man-hours spent on the project. The latter part is what actually deserves the "insider information," IMO. This is similar to the "founders holding many coins having incentive to continue the project" principle.

I'll use raganius' Tennis promotion as an example: We can assume he owned at least some Dash at the time of his promotion, and he took a risk with an effort to get the word out about the project he was invested in, and he (along with the rest of us) would be rewarded if the price went up as a result of that effort. If in the short term the price did not go up and he did not make back his marketing expenses as a result, then that's where the PR/marketing budget comes in, because it is designed for the long-term image of the project. Although I originally objected to the idea of "retroactive funding," I had no problem voting YES for his budget after checking my premise to what the PR/marketing budgets are actually for, and I viewed it as more of a safety net that allowed someone to take more of a risk--one that I supported because his motive and actions (although not financially provable, at least in the short-term) were good for the long-term vision of the currency.

Some good points. For what it's worth, I'm a member of the PR/marketing team and I don't get advance notice of anything. Well, at least not of details. I get just enough information to write press releases, which are usually lacking in specifics because that's not the purpose of a press release. I suspect that the number of people with actual "actionable" information are Evan, Daniel, Udjin, and a couple of others (maybe tungfa). In that case we just trust them not to "insider trade." I think they are very trustworthy =)

Secondly, it's impossible to predict what the stupid crypto market is going to do. I've never seen a financial or commodity market that made as little sense as crypto. If you've been following Dash for long enough, you'll know that over the last 18 months, every time there is a major new release, the price jumps. I haven't done it (yet), but there are some who sell on the jump, and then a couple of months later buy back in lower and increase their holdings. It seems to be an established pattern, right?

Yet v12 was the biggest and arguably most important release since the launch of InstantX, and what happened to the price? It went down. Think about it: the team made massive improvements to the code, eliminating the "hated" reference node and incorporating the brilliant decentralized governance/budgeting system. This is a really, really huge deal--the first currency to be able to fund its own development *and* to decentralize the development/governance process. And what happened? The price went down.

The markets move so illogically that planning to trade with insider information is unlikely to be successful very often.

 

[Dunedoo]

A Dash mining farm.

 

[oaxaca]

A Dash mining farm.

Maybe contact this guy:

[quote author=ziomar link=topic=75678.msg12201513#msg12201513 date=1440156477]
We are starting a mining farm in Kyrgystan.
0.04 USD KW/H for industrial electricity
[/quote]

 

[tungfa]

A Dash mining farm.

www.genesis-mining.com
mining X11 + accepting Dash payments
(Iceland, eastern europe, US,...)

 

[Dunedoo]

www.genesis-mining.com
mining X11 + accepting Dash payments
(Iceland, eastern europe, US,...)

Already with genesis. It would be great if we could a group buy and ask for a better discount than 5%

 

[tungfa]

Already with genesis. It would be great if we could a group buy and ask for a better discount than 5%

I know them all personal (met in HK at conference) if there is a bunch of you asking for "package deal" I am happy to make an introduction !

 

[stan.distortion]

A Dash mining farm.

Saw your post on the same in one of the hash rate distribution threads and was wondering about this one, initially it seemed entirely inappropriate for a coin to fund it's mining but on reflection it would close the loop and make Dash entirely self-sustaining, nothing stopping others mining but it would be able to handle its own security without.

Wouldn't agree with a project to fund that yet though as it simply isn't big enough for an undertaking that would produce enough hashes for a sizeable percentage of the existing hashrate but imo it's certainly something worth getting some active discussion going on and looking at the feasibility from all angles.

Something I'd looked at in the past before ASICs raised the bar with Bitcoin was ideal spots for renewables that are infeasible for connecting to the grid, hydro's the ideal and there are almost unlimited locations with masses of energy available that would require too many miles of power lines to be usable. It'd be easy to set up small in that kind of location and test the waters (no pun intended ), get a small outfit going and find a source of cheap or free obsolete PCs and keep stacking them up, get more locations and do the same, eventually you'd have a huge and distributed capacity that could switch roles to a beowulf array, host dedicated miners, all sorts with absolutely zero power costs.

 

[Ryan Taylor]

Merchant acceptance is a critical issue. It is the 5th most important aspect of transacting online to consumers. Yet this is a real "chicken and eggs" problem. Without consumers using Dash, merchants (at least ones that matter) are unlikely to want to incur the expense of integrating Dash on their websites. Likewise, consumers are unlikely to want to try Dash if there is nowhere to use it.

In terms of online vs. online adoption, while InstantX is valuable for physical point of sale, unfortunately Dash users are too dispersed at the moment to make a difference physically. Like other new payment methods like PayPal and Venmo and Ideal and Klarna and Bitcoin, history has proven that we will get traction online first. I think anything aimed at the physical point of sale is doomed.

There are only three proven ways to break the "chicken and egg" problem online.
1) Offer better security (we offer better security to the merchant as the transactions are assured) - we struggle here with consumers as there is no "purchase protection" (since transactions are non-reversible) and you can't get your money back if goods never arrive
2) Speed - clear value here for consumers and merchants - same as a credit card, but much faster than bank transfers in most countries and way better than COD
3) Convenience - Like with PayPal or Amazon Payments or Klarna or Apple Pay... you don't need to enter your shipping address or credit card number (we aren't very good with convenience either, but I know that things are in the works)... also part of convenience is being able to use it, so we need merchant acceptance!

With the merchants, they have a bunch of costs to perform an integration to their order management and inventory systems. They aren't going to incur expenses for no incremental customers. Also, they aren't going to want to clutter their payment page with a bunch of payment types if nobody uses them... it just erodes the user experience and creates more confusion (which in turn increases dropout of the purchase funnel and lower conversion rates). We need to PAY the merchants early on to accept us.

With all this in mind, I propose a bounty program that we set aside some amount each month to build a larger and larger bounty over time for internet retailers to offset the cost of accepting Dash. Each month, 1,000 Dash (keeping the math simple) will be set aside. The bounty will be paid in the propotion of the IR 500 (or Asia 500, or LatAm 500, or Europe 500) that the merchant represents. It would work like this:

Month 1: 1,000 Dash set aside - no one implements Dash
Month 2: 1,000 Dash + 1,000 set aside - no one implements Dash
Month 10: By now 10,000 Dash is set aside... a retailer representing 1% of the IR 500 implements - they would get 1% of the bounty that month, or 100 Dash, for accepting us
Month 11: 10,000 - 100 paid + 1,000 new = 10,900 in the bounty (and that retailer receives another 109 Dash that month)
Month 12: 10,900 - 109 paid + 1,000 new = 11,791 in the bounty pool

So as you can see, the bounty keeps growing and will continue to add merchants and encourage them not to remove us as the bounty grows.

Rules:
- They must list us on the main payment page WITH the other payment options, NOT hidden behind a "click here for other payment options" button, or down at the bottom of the page
- They needn't be a top 500 site to participate... a bunch of small volume sites is just as good as one big one (it will just be a small percentage)
- For online payment processors like Adyen or Braintree, for each retailer they sign up, they get 50% extra as a referral bonus (plus this incourages them to integrate, which is critical to enable merchants to use us... if gateways / processors don't take us, then it will be difficult for their customers to accept us.

Thoughts? Criticisms?

 

[David]

Saw your post on the same in one of the hash rate distribution threads and was wondering about this one, initially it seemed entirely inappropriate for a coin to fund it's mining but on reflection it would close the loop and make Dash entirely self-sustaining, nothing stopping others mining but it would be able to handle its own security without.

What security?

That's the amazing thing here--Evan is changing everything we thought we knew about crypto. There is no longer a need for network security in terms of a high and distributed hashrate. Dash Evolution will make 51% attacks impossible by defaulting every transaction to InstantX and thus making a confirmationless wallet. The masternodes will consequently secure the network through IX quorums.

The miners will still be creating the blocks, but the actual security will come from the masternode quorums that lock all transactions by default. Once locked by a quorum, even the winning miner cannot create a doublespend. The network would reject any such block.

 

[David]

Merchant acceptance is a critical issue. It is the 5th most important aspect of transacting online to consumers. Yet this is a real "chicken and eggs" problem. Without consumers using Dash, merchants (at least ones that matter) are unlikely to want to incur the expense of integrating Dash on their websites. Likewise, consumers are unlikely to want to try Dash if there is nowhere to use it.

In terms of online vs. online adoption, while InstantX is valuable for physical point of sale, unfortunately Dash users are too dispersed at the moment to make a difference physically. Like other new payment methods like PayPal and Venmo and Ideal and Klarna and Bitcoin, history has proven that we will get traction online first. I think anything aimed at the physical point of sale is doomed.

There are only three proven ways to break the "chicken and egg" problem online.
1) Offer better security (we offer better security to the merchant as the transactions are assured) - we struggle here with consumers as there is no "purchase protection" (since transactions are non-reversible) and you can't get your money back if goods never arrive
2) Speed - clear value here for consumers and merchants - same as a credit card, but much faster than bank transfers in most countries and way better than COD
3) Convenience - Like with PayPal or Amazon Payments or Klarna or Apple Pay... you don't need to enter your shipping address or credit card number (we aren't very good with convenience either, but I know that things are in the works)... also part of convenience is being able to use it, so we need merchant acceptance!

With the merchants, they have a bunch of costs to perform an integration to their order management and inventory systems. They aren't going to incur expenses for no incremental customers. Also, they aren't going to want to clutter their payment page with a bunch of payment types if nobody uses them... it just erodes the user experience and creates more confusion (which in turn increases dropout of the purchase funnel and lower conversion rates). We need to PAY the merchants early on to accept us.

With all this in mind, I propose a bounty program that we set aside some amount each month to build a larger and larger bounty over time for internet retailers to offset the cost of accepting Dash. Each month, 1,000 Dash (keeping the math simple) will be set aside. The bounty will be paid in the propotion of the IR 500 (or Asia 500, or LatAm 500, or Europe 500) that the merchant represents. It would work like this:

Month 1: 1,000 Dash set aside - no one implements Dash
Month 2: 1,000 Dash + 1,000 set aside - no one implements Dash
Month 10: By now 10,000 Dash is set aside... a retailer representing 1% of the IR 500 implements - they would get 1% of the bounty that month, or 100 Dash, for accepting us
Month 11: 10,000 - 100 paid + 1,000 new = 10,900 in the bounty (and that retailer receives another 109 Dash that month)
Month 12: 10,900 - 109 paid + 1,000 new = 11,791 in the bounty pool

So as you can see, the bounty keeps growing and will continue to add merchants and encourage them not to remove us as the bounty grows.

Rules:
- They must list us on the main payment page WITH the other payment options, NOT hidden behind a "click here for other payment options" button, or down at the bottom of the page
- They needn't be a top 500 site to participate... a bunch of small volume sites is just as good as one big one (it will just be a small percentage)
- For online payment processors like Adyen or Braintree, for each retailer they sign up, they get 50% extra as a referral bonus (plus this incourages them to integrate, which is critical to enable merchants to use us... if gateways / processors don't take us, then it will be difficult for their customers to accept us.

Thoughts? Criticisms?

My main criticism is that if the bounty grew large enough and a big merchant adopted Dash and secured the bounty, they would immediately sell the Dash from the bounty and cause damage to the market. What if we were talking 100k Dash going to one big merchant?

Is any thought being given to marketing to those industries with extremely slim profit margins? If my margin is 40%, I don't care that much about the 2.9% credit card fees. But if I'm looking at a 2-3% margin, I double my profit by accepting Dash/Bitcoin.

 

[oaxaca]

Merchant acceptance is a critical issue.
I propose a bounty program .. Each month Dash will be set aside.

OK,
Here's my revised version.

We pay Amazon 1,000 DASH per month to integrate DASH into Echo.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/16/amazon_echo/

"Alexa, can you have a large pizza and a six pack delivered from my favorite corner shop?"

"Of course, would you like to pay them with DASH?"

"Yes, thank you Alexa."

 

[stan.distortion]

What security?

That's the amazing thing here--Evan is changing everything we thought we knew about crypto. There is no longer a need for network security in terms of a high and distributed hashrate. Dash Evolution will make 51% attacks impossible by defaulting every transaction to InstantX and thus making a confirmationless wallet. The masternodes will consequently secure the network through IX quorums.

The miners will still be creating the blocks, but the actual security will come from the masternode quorums that lock all transactions by default. Once locked by a quorum, even the winning miner cannot create a doublespend. The network would reject any such block.

Created another thread on this, it sounds like you're saying mining could become unimportant and if so it could lead to a lot of discussion:
https://dashtalk.org/threads/mining-post-evolution.6404/

 

[fible1]

OK,
Here's my revised version.

We pay Amazon 1,000 DASH per month to integrate DASH into Echo.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/16/amazon_echo/

"Alexa, can you have a large pizza and a six pack delivered from my favorite corner shop?"

"Of course, would you like to pay them with DASH?"

"Yes, thank you Alexa."

We have to be more realistic. Amazon is the largest e-tailer in the world and transacts in the millions of dollars per hour. They will never include Dash unless is suits their corporate strategy; and things being what they are, that will not happen in the near future. 1000 Dash is no incentive to them at all.

This plan could work however, for smaller e-tailers, specialized computer stores like system76, or RasPi (because Dash goes with their philosphy, not because they are small). What I really think we need, and I have said this elsewhere, is more transparency from the core team vis a vis PR. The network has paid out 2? PR budgets, and I for one have no clue how the bulk of that was spent or what the PR plan is for the next six months.

Pablo.