Fresh meat... Yeah, you're definitely a noob. ;-)
I'm doing a reasearch of digital currencies and I lack some information about Dash. Does anyone know how man people are using Dash (an approximate number would be ok), and how many merchants are accepting it as a method of payment?
There's no way to know. That's kinda the point of a coin with privacy features. ;-)
The best estimates are wild guesstimates. They involve so many "if"s and "maybe"s that they're not worth talking about. You may as well postulate how many grains of sand got stuck on people's butt checks from having sex on the beach on every every 3rd Wednessday of last year... Even if that knowledge could accurately be gathered, who cares?
As for merchants... I'd love to be one of them. I've been rather vocal in the community about pointing at the ironic vacuum of DASH being the only crypto fit to be used in retail, yet nothing has been done to support it... The underlying features that enable this, Masternodes and IX, have been left to rot on the vine for almost a year and a half now... I'd be one of the vendors accepting DASH, but there's no suitable mechanism by which I can do it. Plenty of options that look like it from a consumer perspective, but they're terrible to the point of being unusable from the vendor's perspective.
Nobody seems to grasp that last sentence because they're a bunch of socialists who never bothered to think about the other side of the coin, no pun intended. Vendors are users, too!
I recently downloaded Dash Core to try it out and to try and mine some coins, to see how it works. Any tips from experienced mines would be apperciated
You're not going to mine with CPU or even GPU at this point. You'll need an ASIC. But, then, you'll have to consider timing, ROI, time, electricity cost... Why do all that crap for a maybe, if you're lucky, return, sorta?
It's way smarter to set up a Masternode instead. Get paid to provide network service, like I mentioned previously. IX, mixing, soon, DAPI-like blockchain features and more... There's no worry about ROI on a piece of hardware. External market forces keep VPS prices down, isntead of ASIC costs being whatever the market will bear in a specialized machine that does only one thing.... And best, you can cash it back out anytime, so no need to worry about payoff point. My current MNs run on my own VMWare rack. I'm actually paying more now than I used to, but I have more control and flexibility. Previously, I ran my nodes on VPSes that cost less than $0.50/mo and paid me roughly 15%apy (this has dropped a bit as there has been influx, but also price appreciation).
Can your BitClone and it's ASIC do that? ;-)
