Dash, like its name, is a fast cryptocurrency. Dash is an open source peer-to-peer cryptocurrency with a particularly strong focus on the payments industry and has the goal of being the most user friendly payments system on the globe. Dash is one of the few currencies that offer instantaneous transfer of funds from one wallet to another. It is an ideal currency for peer to peer transfer and can be used to buy goods and services as well as the larger transactions such as employment payments. Dash was created by Evan Duffield who originally launched it as Xcoin in January 2014 with the ideal of improving on Bitcoin with:
A two-tier incentivized network of Masternodes and miners Instant transaction confirmations without a centralized authority A system for increasing fungibility (the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are essentially interchangeable) of coins and anonymity of users An improved hashing algorithm (X11)
It was later changed to Darkcoin and then later Dash (DASH) by which it is now known.
InstantSend
As its name implies, InstantSend is a service that caters to near-instant transactions. Inputs can be locked to specific transactions (such as regular payments for example) and are verified by a consensus of the masternode network. Any conflicting transactions and even blocks are rejected. If a consensus cannot be reached, the validation of the transaction will occur through a standard block confirmation. This way InstantSend solves the double-spending problem without the longer confirmation times of cryptocurrencies as required by Bitcoin for example.
PrivateSend
PrivateSend is different in that it is a coin-mixing service loosely based on CoinJoin. This includes using masternodes instead of a single website, chaining by mixing with multiple masternodes, restricting the mixing to only accept certain denominations. The maximum allowed for a PrivateSend transaction is 1000 DASH.
Governance and funding
Governance is vitally important as it provides the protocol for security and consensus on any network changes that might be proposed. Dash was the first decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) powered by a scam proof (using duplicate transactions) governance and funding system. It is a way of having a consensus on any proposed network changes and funding of future development of ther system. As 10 percent of all transactions goes to fund the future administration and future development of DASH, additional developers can be hired to provide such improvements. With the increase in the dash price the available funds for future development increases and the resultant development improvements go to increase the DASH price even further. Hence the currency supports and even improves upon itself.
According to Wikipedia, “Each masternode operator receives one vote. Proposals are eligible for funding according to the following formula: (YES VOTES – NO VOTES) > (TOTAL NUMBER OF MASTERNODES * 0.1). If there are more proposals that meet that criterion than there are budget funds for the month, then the proposals with the highest number of net votes will be paid. Community interaction with proposal submitters is done through the dash.orgforums, or through community-driven websites, like DashCentral. These websites allow proposal submitters to provide multiple drafts, and then lobby for community support before finally submitting their project to the network for a vote. After the submitter has enough support, the network will automatically pay out the required funds in the next super block, which happens monthly.”
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