i concur, very good job. who wrote it?

I understand where you're coming from - $4k isn't small change for many community members i'm sure - but I think we need to put things into perspective a little... Dash has the market cap of a fairly substantial business, currently at $62million, it's by no means the largest in crypto(!) but by all common business metrics a business with a market cap of $62million would have a similar level of turnover, say $60m, and an average of over 700 full time employees supporting the business. Dash in contrast has a fraction of the number of employees, however, it does have a constant (and growing) source of revenue in the form of the blockchain funding of around $800,000 a year. So what does $800k a year buy Dash currently? https://www.dash.org/team/

i think that a team like that is worth that alone, never mind everything else that's getting funded! Like the dash.org domain, adoption into the Lamassu ATM and the Dash N' Drink instant soda machine, along with funding many public events.

And if they continue to grow this project and add value to the project then this $850,000 a year funding could very quickly grow to $2m-$4m...

So I ask this question... Can we expect to further develop and grow the Dash product/solution/business/ecosystem by relying on the goodwill and passion of the community alone? Furthermore, should we as 'owners' (of the currency) expect passionate, dedicated and talented individuals to provide free/cheap labour to the detriment of themselves and benefit of us 'owners' without themselves being rewarded fairly?

The bottom line is that we're not some small community interest group anymore, we're in business! And businesses need talented individuals to continue to grow and prosper. We're not going to retain and acquire more talented individuals by offering one-off bounties on really important stuff like documenting business processes and the whole Dash ecosystem. It's really easy to try and break down the tasks that need to be undertaken and commoditize them, but the reality is that a lot of the work that is required to deliver on the Dash key milestones is highly skilled and specialist.  

If Dash did reach a market cap of around $500million then the annual funding budget will be $9million... Does $4,400 still sound like a waste of money to properly document the whole evolution platform?

Personally, I think it's good value.  

Edit: exhibit B https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/front-end-developers.9942/

Walter  

Just wanted to say we are working hard on some very exciting projects more information will be coming out soon along with updates on the already known projects.

YES from me!

A reallocation of the block reward is not the same thing as a tax. Economic forces ensure there is ALWAYS an equilibrium level of hash power that will be reached given a certain reward level. If the reward going to miners is 45% of the block reward, a certain amount of hashpower will result that covers the miners costs plus some market-defined level of expected return on capital. If the allocation to miners were increased to say 90% instead of 45% (just picking numbers to make the math easy), mining would become incredibly profitable at the current 45%-equilibrium hashrate and you would see a resulting rush of new investment in ASICs and buildings to house them and electricity to run them... in the end you would end up at a new equilibrium hash rate that was roughly 2x the current level, resulting in some tiny amount of incremental transactional security (e.g., from 99.999% secure to 99.9995% secure after 3 confirmations or something). EDIT: BUT, the expected economic return to the miners would be the same either way... at 90% you simply get twice as much hashrate as you would at 45%. It's simply a question of "how much hashrate should the network buy in order to ensure the desired level of transactional security?"

The beauty of this system is that the network can allocate resources towards activities other than mining... activities that provide more benefit than some insignificant amount of transactional security. For example, funding a code review, testers, or security-related bounties could improve security even more than more hash rate. Or more development resources might find some new way to secure transactions altogether, like InstantSend does. Or funding masternodes might strengthen the number of full nodes on the network and ensures they are professionally hosted. And these are all things that can improve security.

Now start thinking about all the other things that can be funded like marketing, research, business partnerships, integrations, work tools, development software, public relations... the list goes on. All of which provide benefits. Bitcoin's model (and virtually all coins) in which 100% of every block is directed toward only the need of transactional security (and worse, toward only one of many potential approaches to achieving that) is nothing short of stupidity. Even Satoshi recognized the needs for incentivized nodes, for example.

An analogy is imagine a world in which Visa (the first and largest credit card network for several years now) took all of its revenue and directed it ALL at transactional security. They bought the best firewalls, hired security experts, built their own private internet, hired armed guards to surround their datacenter, and generally went NUTS with anything security related. Sure, the network was really slow, it got saturated with transactions during peak periods, it wasn't very user friendly, and they didn't offer support. In order to pay a merchant, consumers had to learn how to use a long cryptographic "public key" that looked like a bunch of gibberish to your average Joe. But the network generally worked better than checks and was accepted at quite a few places and was SUPER secure. Meanwhile, they had no marketing, no PR, no business development, no sales force, no new services being developed, no customer service, and no legal department. Instead, they set up the Visa Foundation to handle that and asked the merchants and payment processors and end users to donate toward those things or perhaps do it on their behalf. Of course, the foundation was usually broke or close to it, so unfortunately, it wasn't that effective.

Meanwhile, a few years after Visa got started, a rival to Visa emerged called Mastercard. Mastercard started out pretty small, wasn't accepted anywhere and didn't have very many cardholders. But it did something Visa wasn't set up to do... it funded ALL its needs. They had a sales department, marketing department, legal department, customer service call center (once they had enough users), etc. They started rolling out new services like speedy transactions, increased transaction capacity, developed entirely new ways to secure transactions, made their product super user friendly, added a rewards program, and (gasp!) actually HELPED merchants get set up on the platform.

Naysayers of Mastercard pointed out how "insecure" their network was. They laughed that it wasn't accepted anywhere. They ridiculed that no one used it for much. They pointed out how puny their marketing budget was. Many, dubbed "Visa-maximalists" even scoffed at the idea that there could be more than one credit card payment network... after all, surely the confusion of TWO payment networks would only confuse customers and slow the adoption of this amazing new technology! And the idea that they want to PAY their developers directly and NOT through a donation-driven foundation? What are those guys over at Mastercard smoking anyways?!?!

Which network do you think survives in this scenario long term? Which one will be forced to adapt or will inevitably fail? In hindsight, it will be blindingly obvious which network should have won all along and how stupid Visa's approach was. When you put the scenario we live in RIGHT NOW in terms of two credit card networks, it suddenly becomes obvious what the better approach for a payment network is, and which project will win and which will fail (or be forced into adaptation). But for some reason, people have their blinders on simply because the underlying technology is different. Why!?!? I don't get how the digital currency world has not woken up to this fact yet.

Give us a few years, then come back and tell us whether we were the "dumbasses".

I will absolutely not denounce anyone. They are intelligent individuals who are welcome to say whatever they want. If I am to denounce them because they are critical of some other project, where does that end? What if some community members decide they don't like sushi, which I love - should I denounce them too? What if they have different moral beliefs, or religious beliefs, or they don't love dogs as much as I do?

Your call for "Monero's leaders" (such as they exist) to denounce members of the community for this is a disgusting attack on free speech.

And I look forward to Monero's leaders standing up and publicly denouncing the wretched behaviour of their band of trolls that serve to make all of crypto look bad, not to mention hold Monero back. Alas, that will never happen either.

We need to end this. I'm definitely not the only one who feels this way. I hope you are in agreement on that point.

I think both are innovative and useful in their own ways. I agree that intra-cryptocurrency trolling is counterproductive to the ideal end game.

Hi thanks for the question, I checked Shapeshift.io and Voxels is available when generating the code for your site. Just use the pull down to select Voxels. I think it's a great idea to accept Voxels on your site.

For any of those who missed it, Voxels has been listed on Shapeshift.io

New Updated Version of "What is Dash" video is out (incl all Subtitles) ,
please update your embedded or shared links
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0oNO3mbBE8

Great project but Masternode entrance barrier is too high and might be problem in future.