Deutche bank have just produced this document which is chock full of meaty stuff for Dash people including major vindication that this project being driven smack squarely on target from the point of view of monetary priorities. Instant payments, payment clearing systems, the potential for an electronic form of cash (which doesn't yet exist according to most of their definitions) grabbing large parts of the paper & coin cash economy - you name it, it's all here.
It's vindication for Dash's approach because it further crystallises the divergence and consolidation of the cash vs credit paradigms for electronic platforms as I've been alluding to
here,
here and
here for example.
The meatiness of this document knows no bounds in the context of Dash's current roadmap IMO - I've tried to highlight a few of the best bits but I could have just lifted any chunk out at random. I urge people to read it through from start to finish. In particular it drives a wedge between Dash and bitcoin in monetary definition terms.
I've often thought that the people developing bitcoin's "scaffolding" (sidechains, payment channels), while being very clever programmers, are almost clueless as to what they're doing to bitcoin financially (for better or worse). They're wandering unconsciously into territory of which they appear to have very little understanding but which at the same time is becoming increasingly well defined by others that do, in a way that's going to leave bitcoin "boxed out" of the dominion that satoshi originally targeted: realtime, peer-to-peer payments.
As Coindesk puts it:
For example, note:
"instant” (also “immediate”, real-time”) means less than one minute, ideally only a few seconds"and
"The ECB explicitly defines a real-time payment as a fund transfer whereby the funds are
immediately credited to the payee’s account."Although this isn't necessarily an attack on bitcoin's potential for dominance, it's clear that it will not qualify as a realtime, instant payments network under the ECB's definition - in particular if it starts using payment channels as the predominant merchant facing technology layer because then bitcoin has just re-invented the wheel that already drives the current merchant clearing system.
If we translate the specifications in this document onto a cryptocurrency then what's needed is a
natively instant blockchain confirmation mechanism that is also as natively scaleable as possible without recourse to payment channel meta layers. Add to that a fungible, fully transparent blockchain and you've got an incredibly tight compliance with both historical definitions of cash as well as emerging formulations for defining it on an electronic platform such as the ECB are busy producing now.
Here's the whole doc:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/292980742/Instant-Revolution-of-PaymentsEnjoy ! (and don't be put off by the fact that they cite Ripple as 'instant' - it's a bank remember
)
Highlights: