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Open Letter to CEO Ryan Taylor and DASH Stakeholders

Should we dedicate unused treasury funds (past and future) for ATM roll-out before Evolution?

  • MNO - yes

    Votes: 4 25.0%
  • MNO - no

    Votes: 12 75.0%

  • Total voters
    16
  • Poll closed .

djcrypto

Active member
Background:

Marketing is both an art and a science. We believe that the best path forward is engagement of experts / professionals that can skillfully craft, test, measure, and refine a cohesive multi-channel marketing strategy featuring consistent messaging and branding.


Evan and Ryan


I’m writing this “Open Letter” to Ryan Taylor (“RYAN”) and Stakeholders (“WE”/“US”) of DASH.


First of all, I am hyped for DASH. I love DASH. Thank you for nurturing it, improving it and getting into the Top 5. With recent roadmap and market cap increase, we are seeing a glimpse of the potential DASH has to become the #1 cryptocurrency and change the world! The brand and messaging is simple and resonates with everyone I speak to. However, as a multiple MNO and successful business owner - someone who has to perform highly at all aspects of business - it is excruciatingly-painful to see that we are not maximizing the utilization of Treasury Funds. In this letter, I will explain the importance of the Treasury Funds, the inherent problem with the Proposal Market and offer a solution.


DASH INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY


The DASH Treasury is a God-send - something every crypto would be ecstatic to utilize to its fullest. A common business “rule of thumb”, for established businesses, is that 5% of the top line Revenue should be allocated to marketing. So, spending the entire available Treasury Funds is not in any way “wild” or “crazy” – it is well within standard metrics, and, in my opinion, should be an urgent priority, especially as we are trying to assert DASH as the pre-eminent crypto-currency of the world. Many startups have a much higher Marketing budget to make a splash and build awareness. This is what we must do.


The Treasury affords US an unequivocal advantage to push DASH from Top 5 to THE TOP. I absolutely believe DASH has the brand, vision and capacity to do so. (I wouldn’t keep many masternodes locked up since 2014 in the project and spend time writing this if I didn’t.)


Not fully utilizing the Treasury funds every month is absolutely the opposite of fiduciary duty - we are knee-capping ourselves and throwing away DASH’s advantage if we think not using the Treasury Funds is somehow responsible. The cryptoverse is an arm’s race in hyper-drive! If we don’t use the funds, forks like the already-successful PIVX, and others I know personally who are currently contemplating the idea, will steal the code and eat our lunch. As I write this, we are at an inflection point in DASH history. What we do in the next 12 months will determine the future of DASH. DASH could easily be #4 in 6 months. The time to strike with marketing blitz is NOW – before Evolution to create AIDA (attention, interest, desire, and action).


Due to the open-source nature of this space, it is unique in that there is really very little IP or Trade Secrets. Our IP is our advantage in market cap, Core Team and Treasury. If we don’t use the Treasury properly, the market cap and Core will leave to other more efficient projects.


THE INHERENT PROBLEM WITH THE TREASURY PROPOSAL SYSTEM


The problem is there aren’t enough quality proposals submitted by the free market for MNOs to approve and fully spend the ever-increasing Treasury Funds in the best way possible. In a way, we are currently too rich for the market!

This is where I believe RYAN must step in.


PROBLEM: ON-BOARDING FOR EARLY (PRE-EVOLUTION) AND MASS ADOPTION

If you are reading this in 2017, you are a risk-taker. You're before the early adopter stage. Early DASH adopter to me is a business owner putting an ATM in his store, or someone that goes to an ATM and uses DASH before mass awareness in 2018 (if WE play our cards right).

Every family member and friend that I speak to about DASH wants to buy in (without even mentioning Evolution). The problem is how to on-board them? It’s not a problem of desire – it’s a problem of action, or possibility – the barrier to entry is way too high! Forget coinbase! Average Joe is not going to sign up to some online exchange to buy bitcoin to buy DASH. If we want mass adoption, we need RYAN to hire someone (or a team) to build out an infrastructure of ATMs. We need to make alliances with chains the likes of 7-11 and Starbucks. Private ATMs are not a problem. Think of it like corporate stores vs. franchises. Watch “The Founder” for inspiration. Think BIG.

SOLUTION: I suggest that we invest in a massive rollout of ATMs with unused Treasury Funds every month. We must remove the biggest barrier to entry to achieve awareness and adoption!

Details TBD: MNOs can vote on variables like which brand and how many, etc. Of course, ATM that is compatible with updates for Evolution. RYAN should hire someone to do outreach to see which businesses want to participate. Ask @DashRacer and @bchamz for input or nomination (I approve) as they have proven to be excellent self-starter spokesmen and have already had good success with this.



SHORT TERM SOLUTIONS


Here are my proposed immediate solutions, in order of importance in chronological order:

- Vote to revive all unspent Treasury Funds to a “savings account” and write code to put all future unspent funds in same

- Allow said unspent funds to be used by MNOs or Core (by proposal)

- Hire COO/CMO and team to manage mass roll-out of DASH ATMs.

- Create Help Desk to aid with Wallet Support and updating ATMs, etc.


TL ; DR



DASH is in a never-before-seen position to make exponential progress from captivating a tiny demographic of internet crypto nerds to achieving mass awareness in the next 12 months. This is technology that could positively change the world and provide financial independence – things I think we are all passionate about. However, I believe action must be taken to immediately capitalize on the IP advantages the Core Team and Treasury have afforded us. If not, we will get steamrolled by competition and fade into obscurity. Let’s revive the Treasury Funds and utilize them to the fullest! With that, we can build out the ATM infrastructure to remove barriers to entry and create the possibility for mass adoption of DASH Evolution!!!
 
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Not that I agree with you, but kudos on writing something coherent and reasonably thought out. I was ready for some troll mumbo-jumbo.

Pablo.
 
While I don't particularly agree with all the premises here, nor with the specific course of action suggested, certainly marketing, branding, and timeliness are central to market dominance. I haven't observed any disagreement about this anywhere - the debate has only been over the optimal path to achieving this within the context of a very aggressive overall program.

I think that Ryan and Evan addressed this well enough, however, in their open letter and Roadmap. I also think that the MNO community has been vetting the marketing topic pretty significantly in the CMO proposal as well as other places, so the team has the benefit of seeing a lot of MNO views. Still, if the MNO's collectively want something different, they have process for that too.

Disapproval of one's own particular desired outcome on an issue should not be viewed as 'process failure', however.
 
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In my opinion we should be patient to let the Core Team finish the Evolution. We cannot push promotion before having good product.
 
I think right now every dollar apart from core team funding and critical marketing activities should be spent on getting on major exchanges and Coinbase. Pay them off, do whatever it takes. Look at the volumes the other top coins have 500m+. Our daily volume is dismal ~40m. We need to make it easier to trade and purchase the currency worldwide as a starting point, then branch out from there.

Evolution will come out and we still won't have an accessible way to purchase/trade the coin without going through Bitcoin first and that's embarrassing. Additionally we cant provide access to major investors who trade on those missing exchanges.
Coinbase, Huobi, okcoin, bitstamp, gdax, bitflyer and Gemini.

Edit: to the OP. ATMs ROI are so limited (apart from a marketing standpoint) as they rely on footfall of real people to use them, at our infancy they are not a good ROI compared to a major exchange which can serve an entire region or country of users.
 
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DJCrypto,

Thank you very much for the vote of confidence.

Our current ATM installations are a test of process and procedures for the Dash AeroSports' "seeding" of ATM's. This current process is allowing our team to gain knowledge and professional support/resources (partnership with ByteFederal). Dash AeroSports plan is to travel with two units to each event and leave one behind in a researched desirable establishment. Promotion and protection of Dash Branding are critical for our process.

Dash Branded ATM deployment under our current plan remains funded within our current proposal.

I standby to assist in any capacity should Dash request.

Regards,

Scott Farnsworth
@DashRacer
Dash AeroSports
 
Just had another thought. We could say to the major exchanges as part of a proposal that the first to add dash gets $500k, the second $300k the third $200k.

One month of budget at a million dollars in funding might get their attention.

Also Have terms and conditions to state that dash must be listed for at least 24-36 months regardless of volume etc. same as kraken.
 
I couldn't agree more on that we need to make use of the unspent budget, but I feel that spending on ATMs are one of the least productive uses. I think that getting on major exchanges, and hiring top talent for the team is a much higher priority. Top talent as in the best in the business in their area. Hire a dedicated communications officer to interface between the core team and the dash community and outside the dash community. Hire somebody with 20+ years experience in ecommerce. Hire someone who has been a successful CMO of a major company...
 
Just had another thought. We could say to the major exchanges as part of a proposal that the first to add dash gets $500k, the second $300k the third $200k.

One month of budget at a million dollars in funding might get their attention.

Also Have terms and conditions to state that dash must be listed for at least 24-36 months regardless of volume etc. same as kraken.
I had the same thought this week and think it's a great idea! It would set up some competition between the exchanges to see who could claim the best bounty first. It would also derisk it for them if they thought the trading volume commissions might take a while to recover their setup costs. The other reason I like this is it would not require much if any labor on our side.
 
In my opinion we should be patient to let the Core Team finish the Evolution. We cannot push promotion before having good product.
I think we have a good MVP (minimum viable product) to push now. Of course we can push harder when evolution is ready, but why wait? DASH is well differentiated with a good value proposition today! A lot of people are hedging their bets due to the bit coin fork coming up. Why not capitalize on the situation?
 
I think we have a good MVP (minimum viable product) to push now. Of course we can push harder when evolution is ready, but why wait? DASH is well differentiated with a good value proposition today! A lot of people are hedging their bets due to the bit coin fork coming up. Why not capitalize on the situation?
Because it would push merchants away because of the difficulty that is right now to integrate dash? And therefore push away the same merchants that tried to integrate by that time when evolution is launched?
 
Saving for the future is fine.
But...
Any attempt to re-generate unspent treasury funds should be proceeded by a MN vote because you are talking about altering the coin supply schedule. That is not something which should be taken lightly!
 
My hunch is PrivateSend and the IRS do not mix. It follows then, NO COINBASE.
I would not think this to be the case. Privacy is a basic freedom that all involved in crypto should support. Also, both bitcoin and ethereum are working on privacy proposals. I recently read about an effort to add zkSNARK transactions to ETH. It may take a while for this to come to pass, but I believe increased privacy features will come to many coins including the ones already listed by Coinbase.
 
I would not think this to be the case. Privacy is a basic freedom that all involved in crypto should support. Also, both bitcoin and ethereum are working on privacy proposals. I recently read about an effort to add zkSNARK transactions to ETH. It may take a while for this to come to pass, but I believe increased privacy features will come to many coins including the ones already listed by Coinbase.
If I understand correctly, the IRS has shown continued interest in pursuing Coinbase records. The most recent story from earlier today noted that they will (for now) limit their inquiries to those customers that have conducted at least $20K in any single type of exchange.

While the coins are interested in privacy, I am not sure that Coinbase is as interested, perhaps understandably. I concur with jhoskins' point about avoiding Coinbase.
 
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