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Topic
Board Announcements (Altcoins)
Re: [ANN][DASH] Dash (dash.org) | First Self-Funding Self-Governing Crypto Currency
by
toknormal
on 09/01/2017, 17:30:37 UTC

Switching to duffs as the normal unit of commerce rather than dash (or the in-between units that don't yet have names) wouldn't keep prices stable in a literal sense but would allow the same crypto system to continue indefinitely without "issuing more currency"

Thats true, but the problem isn't really one of scaling, it's in identifying what type of adoption your targeting and prioritising objectives accordingly. Take your pick:

1. use of your token for price denomination
2. use of your blockchain as a payments system
3. use of your blockchain token as a store of value

These are 3 wildy differing objectives, all with conflicting priorities.

Lets take them each in turn.

1. use of your token for price denomination"

How and why are prices denominated ? Right now that generally co-incides with either national boundaries or in some cases monetary area boundaries such as the Euro zone. So, in the Eurozone prices are denominated in Euros, in the UK prices are denominated in Sterling, in the US prices are denominated in $USD. This is unlikely to change anytime soon and even if there's some kind of apocalyptic collapse the IMF will just step in and denominate everything in SDR's.

In other words price denomination is arbitrary and not based on any particular property of the underlying asset from which that denomination was derived. (Sterling, for example owes its nominal origin to units of pounds of silver, who's modern day value bears no relation to that of the UK pound note). You can even choose how you want prices denominated on many websites now.

Conclusion: There's no advantage to anyone in denominating prices in crypto over any other arbitrary denomination, so lets move on to the next type of "adoption".

2. use of your blockchain as a payments system

Ok, here there is slightly more to work with. A blockchain CAN work as a payments system because it can transfer value from one holder to another. However, what are we competing with ? Legacy payments systems which are already inuse, therefore the blockchain would have to deliver some kind of substantial advantage to be adopted. Lets look at the properties that a payments system needs to be attractive to large scale commercial adopters:

 • agnostic (it should be able handle any currency denomination)
 • fast (typically processing a single trade in 2-3 seconds)
 • easily reversible (if the cashier rang my brussel sprouts through on the other guy's bill by mistake they should be able to credit them and charge me within a few seconds)
 • both locally and globally scaleable (i.e. if my business needs more capacity it should be able to add servers to get it. If the network as a whole needs more capacity it should have recourse to growing infrastructure to gain capacity at least linearly with invested capital)

What do you notice about blockchains ? They are lousy at every single one of these. As a payments system they are "welded" to a single denomination, they are slow, unrealiable, inflexible and not easily scalable by the end user. There is 1 and only 1 aspect in which a blockchain scores over a traditional payments system and thats the fact that the blockchain transfers the BASE MONETARY TOKEN in the trade, not a credit derivative. However this is not a priority of payment systems. They are there to facilitate a product sale, not to move capital around which is a much slower, longer term activity.

So that one's out as well, which leaves:

3. use of your blockchain token as a store of value.

To me this is the only form of adoption that cryptocurrencies are worthwhile contenders for. The reason is that (as I mentioned above) they are the only medium that allows two things to be transferred instead of one in the same trade:

 • ownership
 • possesion

In other words they function as a bearer instrument as gold & silver did in the physical realm. Precious metals have lost this ability on electronic platforms because you cannot take delivery on the same platform as the trade is made, so that's where the market is for a new capital asset and cryptos fill that space perfectly.

Where I see Dash Evolution fitting in to this is in 2 areas:

 • it supports transparent fungibility
 • it will support elegant and optimised portability

These are sound monetary properties, independent of whether or not Dash is used as a payment system. In other words I don't see Evolution necessarily competing with Visa, Worldpay etc as a payment system (for the reasons I described above) but I do see it competing fiercely with Bitcoin, Gold and any other capital asset in the realm of accessibility, mobility, ubiquity and fungibility.