Some analysis of the Dash treasury DAO, looking for community feedback before publishing

R

Richard Red

New member
I got really interested in the Dash treasury DAO a few months ago and have been doing some analysis in my free time. I have written up my findings and plan to publish it in the next day or two after some final tweaks.

I wanted to circulate this to the Dash community before publishing. If there is anything significant I have missed or got wrong I would like do know about it.

I'm also interested in your feedback on whether this write-up matches your own perception of how the DAO works. There's obviously a lot going on in the Dash forum and Discord, too much for me to follow, so I feel like I'm missing some significant pieces for understanding the detail of how the DAO works.

I plan to put the data and R code for the visualizations on github, maybe the text too.

I'm on the Dash Nation Discord so happy to talk to folks about this there too.
 
Recently, due to problems with trolls, Dash Central limited comments on the actual proposals to MNO's, proposal owners, and a few folks that are whitelisted for pretty logical reasons. Your article states that anybody can join and comment. That was true until recently.
 
solarguy said:
Recently, due to problems with trolls, Dash Central limited comments on the actual proposals to MNO's, proposal owners, and a few folks that are whitelisted for pretty logical reasons. Your article states that anybody can join and comment. That was true until recently.
Click to expand...

Thanks. I have updated it accordingly.
 
Here is a quote from your report,

"iii) the voting rule and the decision to allow only masternodes to vote in the election makes it “unfairly” difficult for proposals that do not have the support of the founder and core team to succeed because a considerably large amount (about 33%) of masternodes are owned/controlled by the founder and/or core team."

While this has been asserted repeatedly, there is no evidence for it. The fact that a number of proposals from Evan Duffield and Ryan have actually failed strongly suggests that this is not true. If they actually have that power, why wouldn't they use it???

This "estimated wallets" analysis suggests Dash has a better wealth distribution than most or all of its near competitors:

http://i.imgur.com/gGhdjtf.png
 
solarguy said:
Here is a quote from your report,

"iii) the voting rule and the decision to allow only masternodes to vote in the election makes it “unfairly” difficult for proposals that do not have the support of the founder and core team to succeed because a considerably large amount (about 33%) of masternodes are owned/controlled by the founder and/or core team."
Click to expand...

I am quoting that from the Cardano treasury paper which was published recently, I thought that should have been clear? I include the quote because I was surprised to see such a statement in their paper with no reference.
 
TroyDASH said:
You can find a historical chart of the MN count here http://178.254.23.111/~pub/Dash/Dash_Info.html
Click to expand...

That's very useful, thanks. I might include the chart, but I don't see an easy way to get monthly counts out and it seems like too much work for very little reward to try and work out whether historical proposals met the 10% threshold for payment. Afaik the numbers I'm using from Dash Central are not locked to the time when the superblock vote happened so the whole thing would be pretty unreliable anyway.
 
Richard Red said:
I am quoting that from the Cardano treasury paper which was published recently, I thought that should have been clear? I include the quote because I was surprised to see such a statement in their paper with no reference.
Click to expand...

Yes, you readily acknowledge that there is no source or citation. I just find it interesting that this idea continues to be propagated, even though there is no evidence for it. I'm sure it would make the Dash community happy if you pointed out in the article that there has never been any evidence produced in support of this allegation.
 
solarguy said:
Yes, you readily acknowledge that there is no source or citation. I just find it interesting that this idea continues to be propagated, even though there is no evidence for it. I'm sure it would make the Dash community happy if you pointed out in the article that there has never been any evidence produced in support of this allegation.
Click to expand...

I'm not really interested in that and haven't done any research on it, so I'm not going to make a statement saying there "has never been any evidence produced in support of this allegation."

I might just take the quote out though, my point was that with any system like this you never really know how many people are acting as decision-makers. The quote got included purely because I'd just read the Cardano paper and it stood out as a bold statement to make without a source.
 
AFAIK the only thing we know about the distribution is that Evan Duffield claimed several months ago to have 256,000 dash (3% of supply) and that he does not operate any Masternodes. The core team has not claimed anything about their holdings and I do not believe there is any data /evidence to support any claims about how much dash or how many Masternodes are operated by core team members/founder.
 
Richard Red said:
I'm not really interested in that and haven't done any research on it, so I'm not going to make a statement saying there "has never been any evidence produced in support of this allegation."

I might just take the quote out though, my point was that with any system like this you never really know how many people are acting as decision-makers. The quote got included purely because I'd just read the Cardano paper and it stood out as a bold statement to make without a source.
Click to expand...


I'm fine with it either way. I have to say that it's refreshing to see an article/author that isn't dogmatic and approaching it with real questions, an open mind, and actual research. Double thumbs up for that.
 
I didn't find any direct references on education topic on the medium article. It is interesting to hear that one of the Dash Core mission is to make Dash so easy to use that, as an example, our grandparents could pay with Dash frictionlessly anywhere. Don't you think that the budget spent on current marketing proposals is not so efficient used to educate the audience that could make real Dash adoption projects? For instance, inviting programmers to make proposals to create some Dapps with clear Dash use-case. I mean that the marketing as itself is not creating a long-term value if we are approaching the same audience (creating a bubble of reached people). Would be interesting to hear opinions.
 
Lukas Kaminskis said:
I didn't find any direct references on education topic on the medium article. It is interesting to hear that one of the Dash Core mission is to make Dash so easy to use that, as an example, our grandparents could pay with Dash frictionlessly anywhere. Don't you think that the budget spent on current marketing proposals is not so efficient used to educate the audience that could make real Dash adoption projects? For instance, inviting programmers to make proposals to create some Dapps with clear Dash use-case. I mean that the marketing as itself is not creating a long-term value if we are approaching the same audience (creating a bubble of reached people). Would be interesting to hear opinions.
Click to expand...

The budget is still evolving -- if there are proposals like that move us faster toward our goals then surely they would be considered or prioritized. We saw some of that last month where the budget was over-requested and as a result some of the more marketing-oriented projects got bumped in favor of projects like Kuvacash and alt36 which have a more direct effect in real use-case adoption. So I think when it comes down to it, our priorities are in the right place, but sometimes it's just a matter of having to wait for opportunities to present themselves.
 
TroyDASH said:
The budget is still evolving -- if there are proposals like that move us faster toward our goals then surely they would be considered or prioritized. We saw some of that last month where the budget was over-requested and as a result some of the more marketing-oriented projects got bumped in favor of projects like Kuvacash and alt36 which have a more direct effect in real use-case adoption. So I think when it comes down to it, our priorities are in the right place, but sometimes it's just a matter of having to wait for opportunities to present themselves.
Click to expand...
exactly at Troy DASH. am a Togolese I have good ideas and executble plans to make DASH a daily transactions here at Togo
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top