Croutonrant #331 - Marketing a waste of time/money currently! Also PoW is an exclusionary dead end!

[thelonecrouton]

Yes, these two things are related.

DASH is envisioned as being a currency platform that will scale to global levels of users.

This is a non trivial task, never before attempted. Bitcoin was an experiment, whether Satoshi was an independent genius or whether he was a Google 20%'er or an intern/analyst at Illuminati HQ doesn't matter, the experiment demonstrated the basic concept of the consensually determined blockchain, but as released, to this day and for the forseeable future is technically far too slow and inefficient to scale beyond an extremely limited environment. PoW is a stop-gap measure at best, I am sure Satoshi did not envision 7 billion people wasting electricity on blockchain security, and/or all those terawatt fuelled integer operations being concentrated via mining pools which circumvent the whole point of distributed consensus.

While DASH has addressed some Bitcoin limitations (privacy and fungibility) and the overlay network of Masternodes allows scope for greater transaction volume and blockchain custodianship far more secure (by many orders of magintude) than even perfectly distributed PoW can ever provide, these are works in progress, arguably still at an early stage, and not yet ready for prime time.

Here then are the principle reasons that I believe make advertising/marketing directed at the public currently premature:

1. Useability of DASH is still far too complex for the non-techie. Public and private keys, backups, etc. are meaningless jargon that the public are not interested in.

2. PoW is never going to scale to global levels. A globally used currency is by definition going to have a very large market cap and needs to be completely robust against blockchain corruption/manipulation/vandalism/terrorism/etc. There are not enough computational devices on Earth to provide this level of security, and there are certainly not enough people who could afford to run them. PoW is exclusive of poorer users, to whom the concept of spending money on otherwise useless to them computer hardware and furthermore having to pay to run it is justifiably alien.

Those poorer users in poorer nations are also arguably the ones who might benefit from more immediately, and adopt more readily, a trustless, corruption proof and above all cheap to use digital currency and its associated services.

3. Aquiring DASH (or any other digital currency) is currently far too tedious a process. While this may be attributed to 3rd party problems with exchanges, regulations, etc. I think there is much more that could be done at a core level to facilitate people's initial and continued access to DASH. Mining is not an option for anyone except geeks with money to spare for hardware and running costs.

Half the world's population is struggling for basic necessities, mining as a means of acquisition excludes these people completely.

4. ...TBC, getting phonetappingitus so will wrap up...

All of the above issues can only be solved by continued technical innovation, for example further development of the Proof of Service model to allow easier access for smaller investors, and there is a long way to go.

My contention therefore is that development of core technology is currently, and will remain for some time, of vastly greater importance than advertising and marketing, and it is on core technology that we should be spending any available budget.

I have said for a long time that any attempt to advertise within the crypto community is pointless, as it's a minute microcosm consisting mostly of what I will here politely characterise as ADD afflicted opportunists, but I feel that until DASH gets a lot closer to actual practicality as a global transaction platform, any effort or money spent on 'mainstream' marketing and advertising is also pointless.

As technical innovation continues, garnering interest from other developers, strategists and potential platform application providers who will in turn publicise DASH in circles of value is important. Advertising to the public at this stage is not, and may even be counterproductive as new users encounter the various problems outlined above and are not just unimpressed but negatively impressed.


REMEMBER: Just because I might not take myself seriously doesn't mean that you don't have to!

 

[crowning]

I won't comment on the PoW part right now, but:

1. Useability of DASH is still far too complex for the non-techie. Public and private keys, backups, etc. are meaningless jargon that the public are not interested in.

[snip]

As technical innovation continues, garnering interest from other developers, strategists and potential platform application providers who will in turn publicise DASH in circles of value is important. Advertising to the public at this stage is not, and may even be counterproductive as new users encounter the various problems outlined above and are not just unimpressed but negatively impressed.

Exactly. It may even lead to those new users never ever trying it again, because "it doesn't work".

I work in an environment where almost everyone got a degree or two or is PhD and whatnot...and even with THAT technical background almost everyone has already heard from "this Bitcoin thing", but never handled a wallet.

It's just way too early for advertising!
Show up on the well known crypto sites? Yes.
Place a paper in some technical online journal? Yes.
Educate all your friends and neighbours? Of course.

But don't waste money to advertise to the general public...we're just not (yet) there. By a couple of years...

REMEMBER: Just because I might not take myself seriously doesn't mean that you don't have to!

You're on my ignore list anyway!

 

[tungfa]

Nobody is planning prime time TV advertisements or Dash Racing car sponsorships !
Do not worry, we are aware of our capabilities.

i do not even know what to say to the rest of the post
we are not planning world domination for tomorrow, maybe you have not heard but this funding idea is supposed to be for the long run 1- 20 years at least

you have some serious problems with Dash in general, and i guess you should sort them out somewhere else, as they have nothing to do with marketing or a marketing budget or the Funding Discussion we have in the moment

have you tried extending the dash community ?
no, maybe you should give it a try.

you suggest NOT to do any moves at all ?
come on eh, where have you been the last 6 month ???

 

[5kmi]

Playing devil's advocate here... I'd like to focus on point 2...

2. PoW is never going to scale to global levels. A globally used currency is by definition going to have a very large market cap and needs to be completely robust against blockchain corruption/manipulation/vandalism/terrorism/etc. There are not enough computational devices on Earth to provide this level of security, and there are certainly not enough people who could afford to run them.

If there are not enough computational devices to secure the blockchain, then how do we secure it? Or better yet, what will be capable of comprimising it without the aforementioned computational power?

PoW is exclusive of poorer users, to whom the concept of spending money on otherwise useless to them computer hardware and furthermore having to pay to run it is justifiably alien.

Those poorer users in poorer nations are also arguably the ones who might benefit from more immediately, and adopt more readily, a trustless, corruption proof and above all cheap to use digital currency and its associated services.

Ok POW is exclusive of poorer users, but they are not exclusive of middle class users. I consider myself as one of those middle class users: I cannot afford a MN, I have shares in one and I also mine on my 2 year old rigs (at a loss, but they've paid for themselves 10fold) both to help secure the network and in hopes that I will be able to start my own MN before the rigs give up. If we rid ourselves of POW what POService methods are we going to implement to get some DASH in the pockets of poor and middle class users? Devil's advocate aside, I'd really like to hear some ideas about this.

 

[moli]

Yes, these two things are related.

DASH is envisioned as being a currency platform that will scale to global levels of users.

This is a non trivial task, never before attempted. Bitcoin was an experiment, whether Satoshi was an independent genius or whether he was a Google 20%'er or an intern/analyst at Illuminati HQ doesn't matter, the experiment demonstrated the basic concept of the consensually determined blockchain, but as released, to this day and for the forseeable future is technically far too slow and inefficient to scale beyond an extremely limited environment. PoW is a stop-gap measure at best, I am sure Satoshi did not envision 7 billion people wasting electricity on blockchain security, and/or all those terawatt fuelled integer operations being concentrated via mining pools which circumvent the whole point of distributed consensus.

While DASH has addressed some Bitcoin limitations (privacy and fungibility) and the overlay network of Masternodes allows scope for greater transaction volume and blockchain custodianship far more secure (by many orders of magintude) than even perfectly distributed PoW can ever provide, these are works in progress, arguably still at an early stage, and not yet ready for prime time.

Here then are the principle reasons that I believe make advertising/marketing directed at the public currently premature:

1. Useability of DASH is still far too complex for the non-techie. Public and private keys, backups, etc. are meaningless jargon that the public are not interested in.

2. PoW is never going to scale to global levels. A globally used currency is by definition going to have a very large market cap and needs to be completely robust against blockchain corruption/manipulation/vandalism/terrorism/etc. There are not enough computational devices on Earth to provide this level of security, and there are certainly not enough people who could afford to run them. PoW is exclusive of poorer users, to whom the concept of spending money on otherwise useless to them computer hardware and furthermore having to pay to run it is justifiably alien.

Those poorer users in poorer nations are also arguably the ones who might benefit from more immediately, and adopt more readily, a trustless, corruption proof and above all cheap to use digital currency and its associated services.

3. Aquiring DASH (or any other digital currency) is currently far too tedious a process. While this may be attributed to 3rd party problems with exchanges, regulations, etc. I think there is much more that could be done at a core level to facilitate people's initial and continued access to DASH. Mining is not an option for anyone except geeks with money to spare for hardware and running costs.

Half the world's population is struggling for basic necessities, mining as a means of acquisition excludes these people completely.

4. ...TBC, getting phonetappingitus so will wrap up...

All of the above issues can only be solved by continued technical innovation, for example further development of the Proof of Service model to allow easier access for smaller investors, and there is a long way to go.

My contention therefore is that development of core technology is currently, and will remain for some time, of vastly greater importance than advertising and marketing, and it is on core technology that we should be spending any available budget.

I have said for a long time that any attempt to advertise within the crypto community is pointless, as it's a minute microcosm consisting mostly of what I will here politely characterise as ADD afflicted opportunists, but I feel that until DASH gets a lot closer to actual practicality as a global transaction platform, any effort or money spent on 'mainstream' marketing and advertising is also pointless.

As technical innovation continues, garnering interest from other developers, strategists and potential platform application providers who will in turn publicise DASH in circles of value is important. Advertising to the public at this stage is not, and may even be counterproductive as new users encounter the various problems outlined above and are not just unimpressed but negatively impressed.


REMEMBER: Just because I might not take myself seriously doesn't mean that you don't have to!

Mining is still important and can be done by a lot of people where energy/electricity is not an issue for them so I still don't agree with you on this PoW argument, but I do agree with you and crowning on the other issue. Just reading the support questions on wallets/daemons alone anyone can get a feel if this coin is ready for the dream of mass adoption.

 

[TaoOfSatoshi]

It may surprise you, but I actually agree with thelonecrouton on this one.

Dash is raw, and is absolutely not ready for a prime time full marketing blitz.

What I don't agree with is saying that that efforts in this area are counter-productive. Efforts by tungfa and myself in the PR field has brought us countless new Masternodes, and has strengthened the amount of new people coming into Dash.

No one is suggesting to go full throttle at this point, but some form of PR is needed, to grow the community and help us to reach the point where we will be ready for that big push.

 

[thelonecrouton]

Playing devil's advocate here... I'd like to focus on point 2...


If there are not enough computational devices to secure the blockchain, then how do we secure it? Or better yet, what will be capable of comprimising it without the aforementioned computational power?


Ok POW is exclusive of poorer users, but they are not exclusive of middle class users. I consider myself as one of those middle class users: I cannot afford a MN, I have shares in one and I also mine on my 2 year old rigs (at a loss, but they've paid for themselves 10fold) both to help secure the network and in hopes that I will be able to start my own MN before the rigs give up. If we rid ourselves of POW what POService methods are we going to implement to get some DASH in the pockets of poor and middle class users? Devil's advocate aside, I'd really like to hear some ideas about this.

I'm glad you asked me that!

First point mentioned:

Yes, you caught me out shovelling hyperbole! However, my argument about the scalability of PoW and why Proof of Service is far superior in all respects runs like this...

Pretend for a moment you know nothing about crypto. Then try selling this cunning plan to yourself:

Current BTC hashrate = 368 PH/s = 368 * 10^15 H/s ~ 4.784 * 10^20 32 bit operations/sec. *

Consuming dog knows how many megawatts of power.

To obtain network consensus on a theoretical maximum of 7 transactions per second.

So, 368 PH/s gets you barely adequate security while processing 7 txes per second. Does this sound efficient to you?


Why do I say barely adequate? Because a lot of the time, if as little as two of the big pools are compromised, totalling >50% of the total hashrate, there is a 100% chance of havoc being wreaked on the blockchain.

Contrast this with 50% of DASH MNs being compromised, which will yield an attacker an almost zero chance of compromising IX or DS, and by extension, if the same n-of-m blinded MN method was used to validate each block before it was baked into the indelible chain, would give practically perfect blockchain security.

Overlay networks are able to provide exponentially greater protection against attack. Blinded MN's are attack-resilient to tens of decimal places even with large percentages of the network compromised. It is impossible for PoW to come anywhere near this level of robustness.

To get back to scalability, BTC's market cap is say $5 billion. Peanuts on a global scale. Nobody has made a serious attempt to take the BTC network down yet because it isn't big enough problem yet for any serious adversary (think national government level) to bother with.

Let's imagine BTC or DASH worth $5 trillion though. That's big money. At that kind of market cap DASH is going directly up against entranched vested intersts with deep pockets and a very long history of violence. All wars are economic wars. And at that stage DASH will be heavily engaged in one.

Which security model do you think would be better, PoW where 51% guarantees DASH is crippled, if only temporarily, or PoService where an attacker requires a vastly higher percentage of a vastly greater number of targets to achieve a vastly smaller probablity of achieving anything at all? If you think I'm overusing the word vastly, go look up Evan's posts on this - we're talking of the order of 1/(10^20) probabilites.


Regarding your second point:

Proof of Service can be made to allow smaller investors to participate in minting as well. With MN shares and improvements in how this is handled at a protocol level, it should be possible for anyone to easily invest in a share of the network and earn commensurate rewards from doing so. With PoService there's no need to throw hundreds or thousands of petahash per second and megawatts of electricity at makework computation. Just the running costs of 3 thousand (or 5, or 10 thousand) VPS instances.

PoService is inclusive, not exclusive, nobody needs fancy hardware or spare money to pay the electricity bills. Sign up, invest a bit, earn reward based upon your participation.



Regarding PoW being necessary as a backup:

If 3000/5000/however many MNs distributed all over the world (MN distribution is not great currently, too many MNs hosted on too few VPS providers, this needs to improve) all go down at once than Armageddon has arrived and we're all going to have more pressing concerns. And if Armageddon has left you with a working network connection and any old PC or laptop, you can put your MNs back online in minutes.



This is not me hating on miners for the sake of it, I mine DASH to this day, solo on general principles, it's about trying to get the idea across that maybe there's a better way of achieving what mining is supposed to achieve, at far less cost, more inclusively, and more securely. While allowing far greater tx throughput.




*source:
Quote from: gmaxwell on November 19, 2011, 06:26:11 PM
Ngzhang says above that there are about 1300 32-bit operations (in one bitcoin hash) which sounds about right. So one 1GH/s would be equal to 1,300,000,000,000 operations per second.

 

[thelonecrouton]

It may surprise you, but I actually agree with thelonecrouton on this one.

Dash is raw, and is absolutely not ready for a prime time full marketing blitz.

What I don't agree with is saying that that efforts in this area are counter-productive. Efforts by tungfa and myself in the PR field has brought us countless new Masternodes, and has strengthened the amount of new people coming into Dash.

No one is suggesting to go full throttle at this point, but some form of PR is needed, to grow the community and help us to reach the point where we will be ready for that big push.

I think what you and tungfa do is amazing. You guys are relentless, and put a lot of time and sweat into what you do, and I think you deserve to be not just recognized but directly compensated for your work.

This thread is more of a reaction to people saying that 15% of the block reward is barely adequate, and the folk saying that mostly seemed to be coming from the marketing and advertising camps. It worried me, I wanted to state my case without shitting up the DGBB thread any more. Note that I recognize that one day it may indeed be a great idea to spend wheelbarrow loads of money on marketing and advertising, and sending tungfa to Vegas, but you need to be in unbeatable shape before you take a swing at the big guy. We're just not there yet.

 

[darkwing]

You should have stuck with a single topic for your Daily Mail style headline.
Maybe we can ask Strix to do a Guardian thread... I digress.

I agree the time is not right in the broad mass marketing sense.

Design/UI on the other hand needs to be way slicker. And this plays into getting ready for the mainstream.

Getting Dash as an exciting project under the right sort of peoples noses may require some form of "marketing".

Things like the wired article, etc. - build an awareness. Not a call to action to "Get your dash today!" but makes the right sort of people notice and take part.

So instead of a Marketing plan.. think in terms of an adoption plan.

In terms of the Africa etc where you have the majority of the population without access to a computer but almost everyone has a phone (mostly non smart) this is what is needed.
http://cointelegraph.com/news/114054/this-chip-turns-a-dumb-phone-into-a-bitcoin-wallet

How would above same people acquire Dash? Airtime credit conversion or airtime style vouchers. There are already payment systems that do this. The difference is Dash could be sent globally. Get a voucher card at a supermarket. If you can get an amazon voucher why the hell can't you get a dashpay voucher.

Or even a crazier idea get western union or those fools to sell it. They probably aren't ready to admit they are dead yet though.


*edit: "the folk saying that mostly seemed to be coming from the marketing and advertising camps" Are you talking about me??? I was looking at that in terms of having LOADS of developers + needing bits and bobs of other stuff + lawyers etc. and chasing future adoption. Also read my conversation with camo after that I'm just trying to figure out how either option of the plan would work..

*edit 2: Design/UI - reinvent the wallet not put lipstick on the pig that is the bitcoin QT (although our new wallet is a vast improvement)

 

[TaoOfSatoshi]

I think what you and tungfa do is amazing. You guys are relentless, and put a lot of time and sweat into what you do, and I think you deserve to be not just recognized but directly compensated for your work.

This thread is more of a reaction to people saying that 15% of the block reward is barely adequate, and the folk saying that mostly seemed to be coming from the marketing and advertising camps. It worried me, I wanted to state my case without shitting up the DGBB thread any more. Note that I recognize that one day it may indeed be a great idea to spend wheelbarrow loads of money on marketing and advertising, and sending tungfa to Vegas, but you need to be in unbeatable shape before you take a swing at the big guy. We're just not there yet.

Agreed. Thanks for clarifying! Refine the tech, and when it's ready, we'll be able to fund a full court press marketing campaign.

 

[thelonecrouton]

You should have stuck with a single topic for your Daily Mail style headline.
Maybe we can ask Strix to do a Guardian thread... I digress.

I agree the time is not right in the broad mass marketing sense.

Design/UI on the other hand needs to be way slicker. And this plays into getting ready for the mainstream.

Getting Dash as an exciting project under the right sort of peoples noses may require some form of "marketing".

Things like the wired article, etc. - build an awareness. Not a call to action to "Get your dash today!" but makes the right sort of people notice and take part.

So instead of a Marketing plan.. think in terms of an adoption plan.

In terms of the Africa etc where you have the majority of the population without access to a computer but almost everyone has a phone (mostly non smart) this is what is needed.
http://cointelegraph.com/news/114054/this-chip-turns-a-dumb-phone-into-a-bitcoin-wallet

How would above same people acquire Dash? Airtime credit conversion or airtime style vouchers. There are already payment systems that do this. The difference is Dash could be sent globally. Get a voucher card at a supermarket. If you can get an amazon voucher why the hell can't you get a dashpay voucher.

Or even a crazier idea get western union or those fools to sell it. They probably aren't ready to admit they are dead yet though.


*edit: "the folk saying that mostly seemed to be coming from the marketing and advertising camps" Are you talking about me??? I was looking at that in terms of having LOADS of developers + needing bits and bobs of other stuff + lawyers etc. and chasing future adoption. Also read my conversation with camo after that I'm just trying to figure out how either option of the plan would work..

*edit 2: Design/UI - reinvent the wallet not put lipstick on the pig that is the bitcoin QT (although our new wallet is a vast improvement)

I'm with you on all points. Throwing money around right now just won't achieve much, it needs to be precisely targeted, and scaled according to our growth and needs.

There's an interesting (to me anyway) altcoin on BCT that plans to do the mobile-mobile thing. They have a very small market cap and are in the early stages, but so far I like their approach. If you don't know what I'm talking about and are curious PM me, I have been accused of spamming for mentioning other coins before that I thought were doing something interesting or had some approach to something that we just might learn something from.

About your edits, no I wasn't thinking of you in particular, and digging up specific quotes didn't seem like it would be constructive, it was more of a general feeling I got from reading the thread. Maybe I was wrong. And yes, I've done some work on the Bitcoin-based wallet now and it's a horrible mess, I've mentioned it before. I think Electrum could be made a lot slicker a lot more easily, and the thin-client approach is a better fit for regular users with our MN structure. I know steps are underway in this regard but it's early days.

 

[5kmi]

I had 2 questions prepared when I started reading your reply, and you answered one of them in the post: I was (and still am obviously) going to comment on how masternode shares are a form of centralization (one of those words we don't take kindly to in these parts) and that would need to change at a protocol level to enable the small fish to play and provide service. (Bonus question: How do the small fish provide an actual service to the network and not just have their coins collecting interest like a PoStake coin?)
My second question is this: With the current PoW/PoService setup we have now, how badly could a 51% attack on PoW affect our network with the masternodes maintaining their copies of the blockchain and validating transactions? If it is still possible to be compromised by a 51% attack on PoW what responsibilities need to be shifted to masternodes to negate this?

And btw, I'm a p2pool miner myself, still principled but I like to get paid a bit more regularly

Edit: typos

 

[thelonecrouton]

I had 2 questions prepared when I started reading your reply, and you answered one of them in the post: I was (and still am obviously) going to comment on how masternode shares are a form of centrailzation (one of those words we don't take kindly to in these parts) and that would need to change at a protocol level to enable the small fish to play and provide service. (Bonus question: How do the small fish provide an actual service to the network and not just have their coins collecting interest like a PoStake coin?)
My second question is this: With the current PoW/PoService setup we have now, how badly could a 51% attack on PoW affect our network with the masternodes maintaining their copies of the blockchain and validating transactions? If it is still possible to be compromised by a 51% attack on PoW what responsibilities need to be shifted to masternodes to negate this?

And btw, I'm a p2pool miner myself, still principled but I like to get paid a bit more regularly

Edit: typos

1st question:
Centralisation is inherently much less of a problem with Masternodes. It's a linear vs exponential thing. 51% of PoW = guaranteed blockchain mayhem. 51% of MNs with n-of-m subsetting yields (1/((n/m)^no.of MNs in the process))
- eg. if 1000 out of 2500 MNs are compromised and 20 MNs are used in the process, attack success probabiliity = (1000/2500)^20 = 1/0.4^20 = 0.0000010995%

2nd question:
How long a successful 51% PoW attack would bork the network depends on how quickly miners switched to uncompromised pools.

There are two main issues here as I see it, firstly that with only 5 or 6 big pools, the fallback options of many miners are going to point to another compromised pool anyway, and although I mentioned 2 pools being compromised to gain the 51% of total hash, if the NSA can compromise or pull the plug on 2 pools they can pull the plug on all of the main ones and end up owning >90% of the nethash with a single industrial unit full of GPUs. Again, this is only temporary, miners could switch to solo mining, but why risk a network outage of possibly days and the cleanup afterwards which might take far longer (exchanges sorting themselves out etc.) if it can be avoided in the first place?

It's been suggested that I'm a nutter for considering such possibilities, but as I said, all wars are economic, and TPTB have no qualms about killing people (often indiscriminately and in great numbers) who get in the way of their plans. A multi-trillion dollar cryptocurrency is definitely going to be a thorn in the side of governments and central banks... a lot of people in the developed world seem to think violence and war is something that only happens to brown people on TV...

Shifting blockchain security (what miners do) to MNs makes us an exponentially harder target to take down.

 

[alex-ru]

My contention therefore is that development of core technology is currently, and will remain for some time, of vastly greater importance than advertising and marketing, and it is on core technology that we should be spending any available budget.

I agree, but this doesn't mean no promotion is needed.

It is quite simple, if you look from the correct side.
The system has to recive new money for newly issued coins were bought at a reasonable price. At least miners will sell new DASHs to recoup their costs + some MN ops will also sell ...

It's more than a million dollars a year just for price at least not falling.
Are you ready "long term waiting" and enduring the lack of price rising, personally pouring every year more than million dollars? Or on whom are you counting? On investors?

OK, so promotion should be directed not to endusers, but primarily on the investors? - I agree with this.

But investors need to see what they are buying is not an air, but DASH has good chances to become useful for everyone, not just for investors.

Dumb Marketing is not necessary for DASH, especially for the money - I agree with this.

 

[thelonecrouton]

I agree, but this doesn't mean no promotion is needed.

It is quite simple, if you look from the correct side.
The system has to recive new money for newly issued coins were bought at a reasonable price. At least miners will sell new DASHs to recoup their costs + some MN ops will also sell ...

It's more than a million dollars a year just for price at least not falling.
Are you ready "long term waiting" and enduring the lack of price rising, personally pouring every year more than million dollars? Or on whom are you counting? On investors?

OK, so promotion should be directed not to endusers, but primarily on the investors? - I agree with this.

But investors need to see what they are buying is not an air, but DASH has good chances to become useful for everyone, not just for investors.

Dumb Marketing is not necessary for DASH, especially for the money - I agree with this.

I understand your concern as an investor with the price, but I ask you to remember that 'the market' is currently a very tiny group of people, and only a tiny fraction of them are smart enough to see long term value. And most of them are already here. But this isn't the real market. The real market is the real world, everyone who has never heard of bitcointalk and never will. By providing useful tools to the real world we'll see a far greater return than if every cryptognat in existence sold everything else they owned and just bought DASH.

So it's up to individuals. I don't care what the current market value is beyond my trading activities. And I trade to acquire more DASH. It may never hit $5000/DASH at today's $ value but it's the best bet out there to do so that I have found, so I'm making that bet.

Our marketing strategy needs to be smarter than just "spend money!" is my point. Did the Wired article cost anything? Or the recent mention in the Linux mag?

 

[thelonecrouton]

Mining is still important and can be done by a lot of people where energy/electricity is not an issue for them so I still don't agree with you on this PoW argument, but I do agree with you and crowning on the other issue. Just reading the support questions on wallets/daemons alone anyone can get a feel if this coin is ready for the dream of mass adoption.

This really wasn't meant to be Crouton's Rage Against Pools 2.0 :grin:

Longer term i genuinely see PoW as a stumbling block in a number of ways, Satoshi was a smart guy but we of all people should know that his system can be improved upon. I don't think it hurts to try and get more people considering other, possibly better methods.

 

[5kmi]

I understand how the masternode network offers greater security (linear vs exponential) than PoW, my question was: How does this hybrid state we are in right now measure up? Is the DASH blockchain still just as susceptible to a PoW 51% attack even if there are little to no masternodes compromised? Forgive me if I just didn't understand your response correctly, which is entirely possible.
EDIT: Rewording a little here... How badly does a 51% PoW attack affect our hybrid network as a whole?
...and any takers for my bonus question? If we let smaller amounts of DASH mint via PoService in a decentralised fashion (not the current centralised MN share), how do the small fish provide an actual service to the network and not just have their coins collecting interest like a PoStake coin?

 

[moli]

This really wasn't meant to be Crouton's Rage Against Pools 2.0 :grin:

Longer term i genuinely see PoW as a stumbling block in a number of ways, Satoshi was a smart guy but we of all people should know that his system can be improved upon. I don't think it hurts to try and get more people considering other, possibly better methods.

LOL..
Some people have been trying to improve the p2pools and I'm wondering if we need to help them by raising the awareness among miners and get more miners to mine at p2pools... Wouldn't this help better? I think Evan and the team are aware of your concern but I don't think they have any solution or it's any feasible for the MN system to take on this task. All I see is probably p2pool mining right there is the solution for us.

 

[alex-ru]

Our marketing strategy needs to be smarter than just "spend money!" is my point.

Good point!

My simplified position:
1. "exclude PoW" - I don't know how to make it real without killing important compatability with Bitcoin? Limit miners to10%? Risky - first we need to form stronger development team at least.
2. DASH economics will be basically for investors for the nearest 2 years. But to make us attractive to investors - we need to be attractive for users - to become well-known and respected.
3. We can not afford to develop and promote slowly - then we simply have no chances to compete effectively.

 

[thelonecrouton]

I understand how the masternode network offers greater security (linear vs exponential) than PoW, my question was: How does this hybrid state we are in right now measure up? Is the DASH blockchain still just as susceptible to a PoW 51% attack even if there are little to no masternodes compromised? Forgive me if I just didn't understand your response correctly, which is entirely possible.
EDIT: Rewording a little here... How badly does a 51% PoW attack affect our hybrid network as a whole?

Right now miners secure the blockchain and mint the coins, MNs provide Darksend and InstantX services. It has been shown that of the two systems, MNs are far less vulnerable. With coin minting and blockchain under the less secure mining system, everything I said above about a 51% PoW attack applies. MN services would technically be unaffected but the blockchain would get messed up to some degree and for some duration and with blocks being corrupted by compromised mining infrastructure, MN services like DS and IX would become practically useless.

...and any takers for my bonus question? If we let smaller amounts of DASH mint via PoService in a decentralised fashion (not the current centralised MN share), how do the small fish provide an actual service to the network and not just have their coins collecting interest like a PoStake coin?

I disagree with your assertion that there is anything meaningfully centralised about the MN network (apart from people using too few VPS providers) or that MN share schemes add to this (non) problem. Have I understood you correctly?
What I am proposing is that only MNs mint new coins. Small investors in MN shares would be supporting the network as the MNs made possible by their investment would be providing service and strengthening the network, the same as any other MN. It's not interest, it's reward for service performed. There are none of the PoStake issues. Or if there are someone please tell me what they are.