The real value is not so much in its technology, but in how it deploys it to create 'perfect asset-based money'.
I know this looks a bit like an attack on other projects - it isn't meant to be but it's difficult to demonstrate the subtle powerfulness in Dash's priorities without contrasting them against those of alternatives who have chosen to prioritise things differently.
This morning, ArticMine posted a link to
this thread when discussing the bytecoin "premine". That thread contains a link to the annotated Cryptonote whitepaper which I read with interest as I'd never seen that one before (the annotated one that is) and I actually agree with much if not most of the remarks as far as they go.
All the same, everytime I read it though it reminds me how cryptonote just isn't money (to me). It's a cryptographic messaging system which is a very different thing. They've built a safe to hold the money but not the money itself. (It’s not surprising though that if you put together a bunch of cryptographers and ask them to design money that they're more likely to churn out a cryptographic messaging system instead).
The thing is, unlike fiat, in cryptocurrency there are 2 gearwheels (or ‘slabs’) each of which operates very independently of the other but in complimentary roles. One (the public part) attracts value and engenders confidence. The other supports privacy and anonymity (the global set of private keys). If the former is to perform well as money and have a high value then you can't mess with it. It needs to have as perfect as possible monetary properties
With stealth/cryptonote the mistake that’s made in defining money is to assume that the value comes from the privacy (I suppose if you’re a cryptographer it probably does
). Then another one is made in assuming that in turn, privacy derives from obscurity of the asset. There's no base money in existence that I can think of where this is the case though. Monetary value derives from intrinsic
monetary properties whereas privacy is an
extrinsic one.
Old Fiat Banking Model vs New Crypto Asset Model
When people talk about "untraceability" and "unlinkability”, this refers to the public part of the blockchain - not the private. But in cryptocurrency, the appropriate place for “cryptographic protection” of this nature is in securing the firewall that separates those two halves - not in amongst the various addresses in the public part as if they were fiat bank accounts. They are not ‘bank accounts’. They are simply publicly valued blockchain addresses and don’t correspond to people any more than a diamond does.
The fiat system doesn’t have this asset-like dual nature because it deploys a trusted counterparty to manage
accounts, not assets. In other words it’s a bookkeeping job. As far as “the people” are concerned it is therefore all-private which is why I say Cryptonote/Stealth technology is a fiat business model since it’s trying to make crypto “all-private” as well and what that does is turn it from a base asset in it’s own right into no more than a “bookkeeping job” like banking (Albeit on a clumsy, piecemeal, “you-can-see-this-but-not-that”, censoring kind of basis).
As more evidence of this “personalised account, fiat perspective”, note that CN proponents overwhelmingly tend to use personal pronouns when alluding to blockchain addresses which is a misunderstanding of the their nature and a ‘loaded’ form of vocabulary. Even cryptonote wallets actually encourage us to revert to the old fiat way of thinking where accounts “are” synonymous with people, by making it difficult to create and use new addresses on the fly - thereby diminishing their fungibility.
Rather, I think of the blockchain as a containership full of coal plus the certificates of ownership. The coal is in full view but the hundreds of certificates that secure ownership to various tonnages are in diverse private hands. Sure, you might be able to learn something about its owners by watching the coal movements but that’s true of any good monetary medium. Whether it’s cash or coal, the more fungible it is the less you will know, but obscuring the coal stock in an attempt to enhance the privacy of the paper certificates is an exercise in futility as long as it’s reasonably fungible.
In crypto, the real way to maximise privacy while at the same time liberating this “dual gearwheel” approach to work its miracles is to address fungibility *directly* - not by obscuring the public blockchain. That’s what defines the objectives of Dash as a technical project for me and what makes it potentially both extremely valuable
and extremely anonymous.
Maximise anonymity by doing this…
But don’t do this…
Apart from all that, the precedent has been set by bitcoin anyway and IMO it’s now impossible to back out of now that the liberation is there. You just can’t go from a fully uncensored blockchain to a censored one and make it look the least bit attractive because the alternative is the electronic equivalent of a swiss bank account for rich people except without the "trusted third party auditor” (which in bitcoin is the eyes of the world - not an algo) and therefore a breeding ground for scams, heists, deceptions and (ironically) corruption by the ‘NSA’
<— (That was a bit of a cheeky me, but still my honest opinion).
After I post this we will probably get trolled to death and reminded a gazillion times about the ‘instamine’ etc. But it doesn’t change the fact that I feel this important high level analysis of monetary, business process and system-analysis perspectives has been lost in the noise of low level computer science concepts as exemplified by that PDF whitepaper.
Just my own view of course - but one based on a monetary perspective not a cryptographic one for a change
(+ 25 years in the systems analysis profession).
