T
toknormal
Guest
While visiting the street market this morning, I noticed a pattern which to me endorsed the veracity of thinking behind Dash's unique "service tier" of its blockchain protocol. Also, how it powerfully compliments the mining protocol without disrupting it. As it turns out, street markets and blockchains may not be as far apart as it may seem....if you can come up with the right design for digital money !
What's in a Payment?
One of the things that people are only subconsciously aware of is the extent to which commercial "payments" are actually a 2-phase action. However when you apply formal systems analysis to this action, their recurring dual aspect becomes starkly apparent. It also demonstrates clearly why blockchain tech comes a cropper if it tries to support POS with exclusive recourse to the mining protocol.
Consider for example, the key "business processes" involved when engaging a fruit vendor for purchasing a bunch of produce:
1: you indicate your intention to commit to the transaction. ("Give me 2 kilos of those peaches please"). The market vendor reciprocates by committing to selling you the goods. They gather up the produce, weigh it and place it in bags etc. This costs the vendor time but there is sufficient "trust" established that the transaction will take place for them to make that commitment. They may even actually hand you the goods over the counter before you've dug the notes out of your wallet
2. You hand over the cash, the vendor gives you change and the transaction is settled with a "thanks and goodbye"
I arbitrarily refer to these phases as respectively the contractural phase and the settlement phase.
Even in the street market, they are distinct the more you analyse it. For example, a roast chicken vendor may carve up the chicken for you before you've actually handed over the cash. That makes the chicken effectively unsellable to another customer, but because they have a subconscious awareness that the "contractural phase" of the payment is complete, they regard it as safe for them to perform a destructive preparation process on the product.
From Pavement Payments to Electronic Sales
When we look at the current global network for electronic payments, we can see these two "layers" built into the commercial payments infrastructure, no longer subtly intertwined and intuitive but explicit and unambiguous.
For example, an eCommerce system may capture your credit card details when you checkout of an online store. That lets you finish with the trade instantly and go and have lunch with your family (the trade has cleared) while the supplier prepares the goods delivery. But no payment has yet been made, even though we consider the transaction paid, because we're only in the "contractural phase" of the banking process. Somebody at the vendor's end has yet to put it through the PDQ machine and it's not going to even hit the bank for few hours. Even when it does it will take a couple days to clear through so during that period the contractural phase is relied upon to maintain vendor/customer confidence in the integrity of the transaction.
How do Dash Electronic Payments Respect this Model?
Dash is one of several 1st generation, pure monetary blockchains currently vying for acceptance as a payment network as well as a store-of-value. ("Digital cash" - bitcoin's original archetype). However, it is unique amongst its direct competitors in having specifically addressed the distinct business processes associated with such digital payments by decoupling the "contractural" phase from the "settlement" phase of the transaction, and supporting each with a distinct on-chain protocol.
The network's ability to provide this degree of articulation goes right back to its core distinction from bitcoin - the 2-tier protocol where the nodes are able to generate a network consensus in realtime in parallel with the regular mined confirmation cycle. This gives Dash both:
• a realtime service protocol (addresses the "contractural phase" of the commercial transaction so that trade clearing is effectively "instant")
• a blocktime settlement protocol (addresses the need to securely and independently settle the monetary movements according to best practice mining priorities)
On Reflection, What Else Does the Service Tier in Dash's Protocol Do?
• actively maintains fungibility for the entire supply, optimising anonymity whether users invoke private-send or not
• facilitates voting in the decentralised governance system
• facilitates automated payments to contractors in the decentralised governance system
and on emerging roadmapped features:
• will use a network consensus rather than a random single node to talk to client applications requesting services
• will remove the dependency on trusted 3rd parties for lightweight wallet access
• will provide merchants with an active gateway to the blockchain similar to credit card interfaces like Stripe, rather than a passive one that simply broadcasts transactions to be mined
• will aggregate all of the above to push the next wave of development into the hands of merchants, 3rd party application providers and industrial users via SDKs
Busy day. Who'd 'a thought a fruit stall could have been so instructive !!
What's in a Payment?
One of the things that people are only subconsciously aware of is the extent to which commercial "payments" are actually a 2-phase action. However when you apply formal systems analysis to this action, their recurring dual aspect becomes starkly apparent. It also demonstrates clearly why blockchain tech comes a cropper if it tries to support POS with exclusive recourse to the mining protocol.
Consider for example, the key "business processes" involved when engaging a fruit vendor for purchasing a bunch of produce:
1: you indicate your intention to commit to the transaction. ("Give me 2 kilos of those peaches please"). The market vendor reciprocates by committing to selling you the goods. They gather up the produce, weigh it and place it in bags etc. This costs the vendor time but there is sufficient "trust" established that the transaction will take place for them to make that commitment. They may even actually hand you the goods over the counter before you've dug the notes out of your wallet
2. You hand over the cash, the vendor gives you change and the transaction is settled with a "thanks and goodbye"
I arbitrarily refer to these phases as respectively the contractural phase and the settlement phase.
Even in the street market, they are distinct the more you analyse it. For example, a roast chicken vendor may carve up the chicken for you before you've actually handed over the cash. That makes the chicken effectively unsellable to another customer, but because they have a subconscious awareness that the "contractural phase" of the payment is complete, they regard it as safe for them to perform a destructive preparation process on the product.
From Pavement Payments to Electronic Sales
When we look at the current global network for electronic payments, we can see these two "layers" built into the commercial payments infrastructure, no longer subtly intertwined and intuitive but explicit and unambiguous.
For example, an eCommerce system may capture your credit card details when you checkout of an online store. That lets you finish with the trade instantly and go and have lunch with your family (the trade has cleared) while the supplier prepares the goods delivery. But no payment has yet been made, even though we consider the transaction paid, because we're only in the "contractural phase" of the banking process. Somebody at the vendor's end has yet to put it through the PDQ machine and it's not going to even hit the bank for few hours. Even when it does it will take a couple days to clear through so during that period the contractural phase is relied upon to maintain vendor/customer confidence in the integrity of the transaction.
How do Dash Electronic Payments Respect this Model?
Dash is one of several 1st generation, pure monetary blockchains currently vying for acceptance as a payment network as well as a store-of-value. ("Digital cash" - bitcoin's original archetype). However, it is unique amongst its direct competitors in having specifically addressed the distinct business processes associated with such digital payments by decoupling the "contractural" phase from the "settlement" phase of the transaction, and supporting each with a distinct on-chain protocol.
The network's ability to provide this degree of articulation goes right back to its core distinction from bitcoin - the 2-tier protocol where the nodes are able to generate a network consensus in realtime in parallel with the regular mined confirmation cycle. This gives Dash both:
• a realtime service protocol (addresses the "contractural phase" of the commercial transaction so that trade clearing is effectively "instant")
• a blocktime settlement protocol (addresses the need to securely and independently settle the monetary movements according to best practice mining priorities)
On Reflection, What Else Does the Service Tier in Dash's Protocol Do?
• actively maintains fungibility for the entire supply, optimising anonymity whether users invoke private-send or not
• facilitates voting in the decentralised governance system
• facilitates automated payments to contractors in the decentralised governance system
and on emerging roadmapped features:
• will use a network consensus rather than a random single node to talk to client applications requesting services
• will remove the dependency on trusted 3rd parties for lightweight wallet access
• will provide merchants with an active gateway to the blockchain similar to credit card interfaces like Stripe, rather than a passive one that simply broadcasts transactions to be mined
• will aggregate all of the above to push the next wave of development into the hands of merchants, 3rd party application providers and industrial users via SDKs
Busy day. Who'd 'a thought a fruit stall could have been so instructive !!
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