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Dash, backed by innovation

stan.distortion

Well-known member
This is the biggie for me, the thing that makes a place in the top 5 cryptos well and truly justified and I think it could be capitalised on way more as a means of promoting Dash to a much wider audience.

Within this community we know what crypto has to offer but the wider and more general audience only really sees a new type of paypal, we see the potentially revolutionary changes that programmable money can bring but we see very few of those changes actually happening and I think turning those concepts into realities could be a very powerful tool for Dash promotion.

I'm not really suggesting anything with this, more just writing out a train of thought and seeing where it goes. Coming up with new ideas can be challenging but once they're out there its often easy to see how they can be improved and seeing how digital cash could improve services with a wide audience could lead to an awful lot of uptake. So far that's been slow to take off, users making requests to a company to accept crypto (from which its usually converted to fiat), vendors jumping on the crypto hype cycle (again, to fiat) and a relatively small number that make innovative stuff happen because they believe in crypto.

In my opinion that last area is one worth funding, seeing the innovative opportunities that go towards creating a genuine crypto economy and making them happen, not waiting for someone to see a golden opportunity and work towards it but to place the whole thing wrapped up and ready to go in their hands and have them laughing all the way to funds on a secure private key.

Who, what and where is another story and each of us can probably see half a dozen of them but I'd focus more on the supply end of things, areas where the outgoing expenses are mainly hours of labour with low fiat expenditure. Crypo's already made some headway into things like market gardens and imo that's an ideal area, directly connecting supplier and producer for organic foods, wines, coffee tea, beer, wine, forestry, quarrying, self sufficient communities etc etc. Deliveries and logistics are a prime target but they're secondary, the energy that fuels them would be the holy grail but that may be a bit ambitious :)

What kind of things can crypto do in these areas to make a significant difference? Group buys for small scale producers could be a big one and a marketplace to enable the direct connection between supplier and customer could make a huge difference but its hard to see a clear course on that one, maybe a solid and maintained global directory of individuals that will accept Dash could be a stepping stone towards that? Idk but crypto will change the world and we're in a prime position to make those changes happen.
 
I don't claim to fully see your vision but it seems to me we need to make more of an effort to interact with the outside world. We have, for example, a marketplace forum that doesn't really get that much use. If we aren't eating our own dog food, then how can we expect others to participate?

Yes, resources to help connect people in the supply chain, and I think it would work better if we embraced other cryptos i.e. to leverage network effect.

I also strongly feel that ultimately, a crypto such as dash, should aim to build a self-sufficient ecosystem, that doesn't require fiat exchanges. A system that can allow people to easily join, earn and spend.

I also suspect things are going to get a whole lot easier once the new dash protocols and DAPI are implemented.
 
DASH has a lot of potential, but just like we did for bitcoin, we need to give it time before it grows bigger than the rest!

That sounds to me like we need to wait — and I think, no, we need to innovate. To make the software and tools that aren't there currently. There's a lot of room to grow and we're not really taking up the slack. For example, a solid BIP32 wallet for Dash -- that technology's been out since before Darkcoin came out, but we're still talking about backing up wallet.dat files, etc.

Heck, even Electrum isn't taking full advantage of HD wallets — it only uses one of the possible paths in a chain (maybe a 2nd for change addresses, not sure on that).

But why not build a wallet which enables users to choose their own HD paths and label those for different accounts, and also to import xpub* keys (master public keys) and give a label to those, and be able to work with multiple ones without having to reload a new "wallet" each time?

What about a wallet which allows sending to multiple addresses at once? Do these even exist yet? (As far as I know, this has to be done manually.) And if they do, is there an HD wallet (BIP32) that enables this? That would be huge.

I want to implement something like this. (I haven't due to lack of time and resources.) I think it would be huge for adopting, just like Electrum made it so much easier for "normal" people to use Bitcoin without having to download the clunky software and huge blockchain with it.

(Yes, Electrum Dash is coming out, but, for one, it's not synced with the most current Electrum commits, and it's also not ready for prime-time — can't do MN things or any special Dash features for one).

And hey, why not build BIP32 into the standard client, instead of having to back up wallet.dat files?

That's just software, and only that I can think of off the top of my head. So yeah, plenty of room for innovation in many areas. But I think that we have to go out & build it, not just wait for the Dash ecosystem to grow. We have to grow it.
 
+1, I hadn't really got my head around BIP32 before but its making more sense now and it sounds like a real evolution in how the network can function. It'd be a great example and be a benefit to all Satoshi-style* networks, so far that's mostly been the other way around with things built upon work initially done with Bitcoin, it'd be great to have others building on Dashs work.

*Saw that in the Evolution docs and got a kick out of it :) Couldn't help thinking of:
 
Unless you are operating at the high-end of the development scale - as ED is, etc., - there is not a huge amount one can do beyond what the Foundation is already doing in terms of general promotion. DASH is a quiet coin. It is clearly on paper a far better coin than LTC, but try telling that to people holding LTC. The best thing to do is to promot the already existing projects, responding to the innovations of the devs through marketing/promotion and general defence on the usual forums and whatnot.
 
For me a big innovation in Evolution is the web integration.

Right now if you're selling online the only real viable option to integrate crypto is to use a centralized payment gateway, because not many merchants want to pay developers to integrate/host/maintain additional infrastructure to stay trustless and your average web developer won't like being told to setup a crypto wallet and get the RPC working, instead of pasting 8 lines of Javascript from Google Wallet's SDK into an HTML page.

DAPI / DashPay opens Dash to the web retail market, which is like 90% of the kind of transactions we want Dash to go after worldwide and no other crypto can do that without an external centralized service, because you need a 2-tier collateralized network architecture that is protected from Sybil attacks and also incentivized so its got the power and availability to compete with backends like PayPal and GoogleWallet (which we certainly have already with 3,400 Masternodes).

Other cryptos are not really taking this approach, with this Evo feature is more of an entrepreneurial approach which I think is what needs to start happening in crypto more to get it off the ground - mainstream adoption will come from competing well in the markets that have the users we want to deliver Dash's value to, not what most cryptos are doing which is just telling people it's the best solution when the whole merchant integration / customer experience is a mess and it's harder to use and when you do it's not decentralized so the whole reason to go to the extra effort is negated - instead the philosophy is let's make great product and make merchants / customers / developers lives easier so they choose Dash above the competition, and in a decentralized way.

I think that's the kind of real innovation that disrupts markets and my favorite part, instead of waiting for users to find Dash, go out there and provide a better service that user's will choose because it's easier / better / cheaper / faster.

Theres lots of other innovation in Evolution of course but for me personally this can be a big game changer if we get everything right and work hard on it.
 
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OK, my mind is becoming blown.

Something just hit me regarding the distant future. This is just a thought or "what if". Also please don't hold my ignorance against me. :)

Mass adoption now means becoming a Paypal-like company. And in my opinion, there is a stigma associated with cryptocurrency in general by the masses. The dark web, malware extortion are just two reasons why that come to mind immediately.

We could be on the brink of the grandaddy of all crypto innovations. DASH could be the first and possibly only crypto that becomes a legitimate company traded on the NasDaq and shed that stigma. We could vote each "coin" into a share or multiple shares of stock. IPO anyone?

There is so much chatter about companies interested in blockchain tech and exploring. DASH would be the first truly decentralized publicly traded company completely based blockchain tech that will be offering a much needed service.

I wonder how regulation would fit into that scenario though.
 
That would surely defeat the whole purpose of cryptocurrency? The idea is surely never to become a centralised entity. First because you do not want any entity, even if it is a relatively distributed corporation, to have power and secondly to avoid issues about being brough down (which a state could do to anything called a company). It's why we have 'foundations' since, as the Bitcoin foundation have done in the past, they can just say they are advocates.
 
That would surely defeat the whole purpose of cryptocurrency? The idea is surely never to become a centralised entity. First because you do not want any entity, even if it is a relatively distributed corporation, to have power and secondly to avoid issues about being brough down (which a state could do to anything called a company). It's why we have 'foundations' since, as the Bitcoin foundation have done in the past, they can just say they are advocates.

I guess my point was to shed the stigma and become truly legitimate in the eyes of the masses.
 
I guess my point was to shed the stigma and become truly legitimate in the eyes of the masses.

That would be a quite big departure for cryptocurrency. I am not opposed to it as such, but it would involve setting DASH up as a third-party, centralised type entity.
 
With the DAPI parts of Evolution, I think the idea is to be able compete with PayPal but as a decentralized web system, the first of it's kind. In PayPal your web requests go to a server farm controlled by the company. With Evolution, web requests are served by clusters of Masternodes in quorums so requests are distributed across the whole network. That's decentralized because they are random quorums from a large network and they are operated by a large number of P2P users distributed around the world.

Dash network will function similar to a BaaS system (backend as a service) in that users just build frontends and call the backend through a common API with everything handled for them, in terms of integrating it into sites and apps and also using it, it will be just like using PayPal or any other payment processor. The key difference is no 3rd party is being used, it's crypto but on the web - crypto doesn't work on the web, or when it does it's centralized, it seems like ecosystems are just becoming centralized services markets because Crypto only works with a desktop and 40GB of blockchain locally - the Dash way is to decentralize it, and that's what DAPI is about :D
 
I guess my point was to shed the stigma and become truly legitimate in the eyes of the masses.

Legitimacy in the eyes of the masses does not involve Wall Street. Leave that to BTC. They are so far down the banksters gullets it can never be vomitted back up. More and more of "the masses" are avoiding Wall Street every day. Better to concentrate on functionality and adoption will surely follow.
 
The masses don't even have an opinion on Wall Street in terms of technology they use. They are happy enough as long as products tick along even if they know Wall Street is a goddamn racket (like almost everything in life). I'm not so hard on Bitcoin myself. We all depend on its success really.
 
Maybe a little off-topic, but I would very much like to see the new DAPI standardized across all cryptos. This would make things so much easier for both developers and end-users. For example, address books / file storage / paste-bins etc could all be seamlessly moved between competing networks.
 
Maybe a little off-topic, but I would very much like to see the new DAPI standardized across all cryptos. This would make things so much easier for both developers and end-users. For example, address books / file storage / paste-bins etc could all be seamlessly moved between competing networks.

That would make a hell of a lot of sense and it will be there for the taking, tried, tested and ready to go and maybe even with tools to make implementation simple.Wow, already impressed with primitives but cross-platform primitives... coupled with value transfer that's re-inventing the internet :)
 
The masses don't even have an opinion on Wall Street in terms of technology they use. They are happy enough as long as products tick along even if they know Wall Street is a goddamn racket (like almost everything in life). I'm not so hard on Bitcoin myself. We all depend on its success really.

I agree, most users care about what value they can get and how easy it is to use.

Users do care about cost though, and the cost of centralized payment processors above higher fees is that they can freeze your funds, and that's one of the main complaints at PayPal, a lot users feel like they are not in control even though it's their money

If we can make a PayPal-like experience users can assess on added value like how Dash can never seize your funds because it's a decentralized system and no one is intruding into your personal information if you don't want them too.

Sometime you hear people say in crypto that most users don't care about decentralization, but I think it's more about most user's don't have access to decentralization because crypto was designed to run on the desktop when most users do finance on the web. If they had easy access to a decentralized payments option, the value is there and I think a lot more users would choose it.
 
Sometime you hear people say in crypto that most users don't care about decentralization, but I think it's more about most user's don't have access to decentralization because crypto was designed to run on the desktop when most users do finance on the web. If they had easy access to a decentralized payments option, the value is there and I think a lot more users would choose it.

I would be careful about giving the average user too much info. They don't have the time nor do they have the desire to understand how it all works. If they had the choice between a known service and a "new" one that does something different, they would choose the known. I would choose the known, legitimate company and I have a slight understanding of all this.

Regardless, I'm along for the ride so "it is what it is".
 
I would be careful about giving the average user too much info. They don't have the time nor do they have the desire to understand how it all works. If they had the choice between a known service and a "new" one that does something different, they would choose the known. I would choose the known, legitimate company and I have a slight understanding of all this.

Regardless, I'm along for the ride so "it is what it is".

I don't fully understand your meaning. Do you mean it will be hard to gain traction with a PayPal alternative because users will just trust the existing services?
 
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