Right everybody, stop bickering and fix attention on this:

Open Goal

[1] - bitcoin developers have left an open goal by implicitly declaring the bitcoin protocol un-evolvable due to 'fear' of doing something dodgy and affecting the marketcap

[2] - Dash is basically the only significant competitor in a position to take advantage of this, being that:

a) it inherits bitcoin's codebase

b) its mission is to do exactly the opposite of staying still - i.e. evolve the protocol to pursue monetary objectives, not least that of making the coins at one address look indistinguishable from those at any other and making confirmation time near instantaneous

Those are the centuries-old acknowledged properties of perfect CASH.

Look Around You

[3] - the genius of the Dash protocol is have articulated the network logic while at the same time decentralising it. Having worked in client-server technologies all my adult life, this for me is the biggest breakthrough.

Look around you. Look at the internet, look at social networks, look at ATM networks, look at VOIP, look at online storage, look at just about anything you want - none of it would have even got off a desktop without articulated network protocols. The idea that the world's next great monetary network won't be taking advantage of such architecture is ludicrous.

A Business Logic Layer at Last

[4] - I am interested in DAPI. What this looks like to me from the smoke signals so far, is a high level interface to the network. A proper business-layer API as opposed to a nerdy C++ one for 'Mastering Bitcoin' readers.

If you've spent your life writing business software, the significance of this cannot be overstated. Nobody is doing it (apart from possibly in the Bitcoin 2.0 world) because they've all got stuck in the "Chasm" between the early adopters and the early majority where the "Peter Todd" type nerd comfort zone resides. Accessing the early majority requires some bold steps out of that comfort zone to address a completely different audience and DAPI drives a train right through those technical barriers to adoption.

Aside from the commercial opportunities, just the idea of interfacing with the network as an entity as opposed to a single machine proxying for the network is going to be amazing to see how this works.

The Real Audience

[5] - Money has always been a sociological phenomenon, not a technological one and the same will hold true for cryptocurrencies. Anyone who followed my exchange with smooth in recent pages will be aware of the blundering myopia that many crypto promoters live under. They think that we don't have a job to do in making the technology recognisable and compliant with sociological priorities. They think society has a job to do in discovering the technology. Well I'm sorry but that will be their epitaph.

The rules of money were written a good few thousand years before the rules of crypto will outlive them by another good few millennia. To me, Dash is one of the few projects that recognises that fact and sets its objectives appropriately. Make no mistake, this next year of development looks like taking us an order of magnitude closer to achieving them.