1 gigabyte blocks? what do these people know that almost everyone else who's ever looked at bitcoin do not? does it require one of their $20,000 nodes?

it's one thing to make it happen in a lab. it's quite another when you have to stretch it across the world a few thousand times all at once.

Craig Wright: Dash and BCash Compete for the Same Vision

Craig Wright indicated a friendly competition between Dash and BCash as both seek to replace Bitcoin’s vacant throne as king of digital cash payments.

In a debate on Twitter over scaling Bitcoin for fast and cheap everyday commerce transactions, Wright, the chief scientist at nChain, maintained the need for instant and cheap transactions in order for it to be useful for point-of-sale transactions:

The method for this result preferred by Wright was reliable zero-confirmation transactions, which may not settle on the blockchain immediately, but still are reliable to be trusted when broadcast for smaller amounts. Dash can be used in this manner as well, except has an added benefit of the InstantSend^* functionality, which uses masternodes to lock in a transaction until it has been confirmed by miners, ensuring that the transaction will definitely settle.

^*Months ago, InstantSend was hacked and for the safety of the network completely disabled.  Despite the August announcement of a supposedly-existing but never-actually-available hotfix, InstantSend remains broken and will not be fixable in time to keep Evolution on schedule.