I barely had the motivation to write this post and I'm not entirely sure why I'm doing it now, other than a remote hope that someone else might actually care. In essence, I have become very disenchanted with the direction dash appears to be taking. Having given this some thought, I've come to the personal opinion that Evan is the wrong person to steer this project, or that dash would benefit from a fork. (I'm not the right person to actually do that)
One of the big problems I have with dash is it's current obsession with fiat gateways at the expense of innovation in other areas. And with instant transactions and fiat so high on the list, ALL dash projects should be concentrating on the mobile experience.
I ask myself, what originally attracted me to cryptocurrencies? And what made me so disenchanted with bitcoin? The answer can be found in the original pillars, including anonymity, decentralisation, distribution and permissionless. Look at those pillars now; fiat gateways became the dominant pattern, stripping us of anonymity and liberty. We're pretty much back to square one and the revolution didn't happen, at least not on the scale we were sold. How can we proclaim the corruption and weakness of fiat yet be so eager to get into bed with it?
I'm going to highlight three examples where dash could be concentrating and innovating it's efforts:
1. Security / centralisation
The masternode network sits on top of public ip's. More than half of those MNs sit on top of just four cloud services. Thus, the price for giving our end users anonymity is that masternode operators are unduly exposed to outside interference.
In fairness, when it comes to anonymity, there are significant technical hurdles to overcome, not least because anonymous layers would probably forgo instant transactions. But more worryingly, to my knowledge, a lot of Evolution is being hard wired to that list of public ip addresses. Thus, the move to an anonymous layer, in part or whole, would be substantial, impossible or unlikely.
There's also no escaping that crypto is a growing force in the shadow economy. For better or worse, crypto is the new tax haven. But it could also be the new way to collect tax and fund services. Does dash have an improved shadow economy on it's roadmap?
2. Governance
It was Evan that pulled off the marketing trick, allowing MNOs to vote for a block size increase; voting for something the core team wanted to do. Would it hold to vote for something they didn't want to do?
But anyway, Evan has this newfangled idea about project based budgets etc. This is what we're reduced to; trial and error. Didn't quite work the first time, let's try something else then rinse and repeat. NO, this is not governance!
Dash's idea of governance is very self-serving and introspective. That's not innovative, it just shows how little we know about governance. What we need is a flexible voting and budgeting system we can rent out to others. A local authority, for example, would maintain their own rules and their own database of voters, but they would outsource the voting and budgeting process to dash. The processes and results of votes and budgets sitting on a blockchain and ensuring anonymity and impartiality. Once this is established, we could create a dash authority, or even a competing dash authority.
And talking of voting and being a disenchanted user, I think our own rulebook should enforce MNO voting for at least 50% of proposals / projects. Additionally, there should be an abstain option. But once again, just to be clear, this voting-budgeting model should not be hard wired but, rather, a process we rent (as described above).
3. Dash Drive
Evolution, quick quick, reserve your unique id before it's taken by someone else. Ugh, once again, another Evan brainwave. A dash username space hard wired for dash. Again, self-serving and short-sighted. The only community this benefits is dash.
Once again, as with governance, the namespace should be rented out, behaving like a simplified dns system. Use the MNs to rent out a key-value search space. Vodafone comes along, they have their own customer database and they rent a block of, say, ten million key-value pairs to the "@vodafone" domain. Vodafone would be responsible for issuing id's (unique or otherwise), sms authentication and so on. Dash would simply provide the management tools. What could be simpler than sending money to someone's telephone number (1234555@vodafone), with some assurance that it would actually go to the right person.
- open to all organisations, big or small
- tiered charging based on api access and duration
- increased income to MNOs.
Conclusion
Did you notice a theme? Evan says, "I have an idea, let's try this...". And, when I think about it, that's pretty much his modus operandi. A good example would be DarkSend... Evan had a good idea of how to solve one particular problem, but later something more interesting things came along - e.g. Evolution, fiat gateways etc - and suddenly privacy is no longer the project's priority. Evan says he holds privacy close to his heart but I disagree, his focus has changed. He's an ideas person.. nothing wrong with that, but our dependency on him makes the project fickle.
On top of this, we have a two year timetable for the full Evolution and I don't see anything substantive regarding anonymity, dns or governance, other than hard wiring and re-wiring it's own rules. Two years is a very long time, leaving it wide open for others to do the stuff we're not.
Dash is not going to change the world by being self-indulgent, it needs to give value to other people and communities. We're clearly not experts in dns or governance so what's all this fluffing about trying to do it ourselves?
For all these reasons, my enthusiasm in dash has waned considerably.
Ideas:
- improved protection to MNOs
- rent out the services we use e.g. governance and key-value pairs
- tax and the shadow economy
- greater coin distribution and availability e.g. create an interchangeable doge-like sister coin
- merge or co-ordinate with other blockchains and projects
- adopt a mobile-apps-only policy
One of the big problems I have with dash is it's current obsession with fiat gateways at the expense of innovation in other areas. And with instant transactions and fiat so high on the list, ALL dash projects should be concentrating on the mobile experience.
I ask myself, what originally attracted me to cryptocurrencies? And what made me so disenchanted with bitcoin? The answer can be found in the original pillars, including anonymity, decentralisation, distribution and permissionless. Look at those pillars now; fiat gateways became the dominant pattern, stripping us of anonymity and liberty. We're pretty much back to square one and the revolution didn't happen, at least not on the scale we were sold. How can we proclaim the corruption and weakness of fiat yet be so eager to get into bed with it?
I'm going to highlight three examples where dash could be concentrating and innovating it's efforts:
1. Security / centralisation
The masternode network sits on top of public ip's. More than half of those MNs sit on top of just four cloud services. Thus, the price for giving our end users anonymity is that masternode operators are unduly exposed to outside interference.
In fairness, when it comes to anonymity, there are significant technical hurdles to overcome, not least because anonymous layers would probably forgo instant transactions. But more worryingly, to my knowledge, a lot of Evolution is being hard wired to that list of public ip addresses. Thus, the move to an anonymous layer, in part or whole, would be substantial, impossible or unlikely.
There's also no escaping that crypto is a growing force in the shadow economy. For better or worse, crypto is the new tax haven. But it could also be the new way to collect tax and fund services. Does dash have an improved shadow economy on it's roadmap?
2. Governance
It was Evan that pulled off the marketing trick, allowing MNOs to vote for a block size increase; voting for something the core team wanted to do. Would it hold to vote for something they didn't want to do?
But anyway, Evan has this newfangled idea about project based budgets etc. This is what we're reduced to; trial and error. Didn't quite work the first time, let's try something else then rinse and repeat. NO, this is not governance!
Dash's idea of governance is very self-serving and introspective. That's not innovative, it just shows how little we know about governance. What we need is a flexible voting and budgeting system we can rent out to others. A local authority, for example, would maintain their own rules and their own database of voters, but they would outsource the voting and budgeting process to dash. The processes and results of votes and budgets sitting on a blockchain and ensuring anonymity and impartiality. Once this is established, we could create a dash authority, or even a competing dash authority.
And talking of voting and being a disenchanted user, I think our own rulebook should enforce MNO voting for at least 50% of proposals / projects. Additionally, there should be an abstain option. But once again, just to be clear, this voting-budgeting model should not be hard wired but, rather, a process we rent (as described above).
3. Dash Drive
Evolution, quick quick, reserve your unique id before it's taken by someone else. Ugh, once again, another Evan brainwave. A dash username space hard wired for dash. Again, self-serving and short-sighted. The only community this benefits is dash.
Once again, as with governance, the namespace should be rented out, behaving like a simplified dns system. Use the MNs to rent out a key-value search space. Vodafone comes along, they have their own customer database and they rent a block of, say, ten million key-value pairs to the "@vodafone" domain. Vodafone would be responsible for issuing id's (unique or otherwise), sms authentication and so on. Dash would simply provide the management tools. What could be simpler than sending money to someone's telephone number (1234555@vodafone), with some assurance that it would actually go to the right person.
- open to all organisations, big or small
- tiered charging based on api access and duration
- increased income to MNOs.
Conclusion
Did you notice a theme? Evan says, "I have an idea, let's try this...". And, when I think about it, that's pretty much his modus operandi. A good example would be DarkSend... Evan had a good idea of how to solve one particular problem, but later something more interesting things came along - e.g. Evolution, fiat gateways etc - and suddenly privacy is no longer the project's priority. Evan says he holds privacy close to his heart but I disagree, his focus has changed. He's an ideas person.. nothing wrong with that, but our dependency on him makes the project fickle.
On top of this, we have a two year timetable for the full Evolution and I don't see anything substantive regarding anonymity, dns or governance, other than hard wiring and re-wiring it's own rules. Two years is a very long time, leaving it wide open for others to do the stuff we're not.
Dash is not going to change the world by being self-indulgent, it needs to give value to other people and communities. We're clearly not experts in dns or governance so what's all this fluffing about trying to do it ourselves?
For all these reasons, my enthusiasm in dash has waned considerably.
Ideas:
- improved protection to MNOs
- rent out the services we use e.g. governance and key-value pairs
- tax and the shadow economy
- greater coin distribution and availability e.g. create an interchangeable doge-like sister coin
- merge or co-ordinate with other blockchains and projects
- adopt a mobile-apps-only policy
