Lack of faith in the Dash Core team or in the project itself might not be the central reason, could there be ulterior motives too? Some of the negativity within the posts would not be out of place for paid competitors or even disgruntled investors
@JollyGood There is no "negativity".
There is a challenge to the idea that for a mined coin, inflating the supply on a purely numerical basis rather than subjecting it to competitive mining, is healthy and
may in fact cause capital to migrate to other assets if it's looking for a store of value. This theory seems to have been endorsed by observations.
Speaking for myself, I've promoted Dash for many years on the basis that it can do what bitcoin cannot. i.e. support the archetype of a highly valued, scarce digital commodity while making it super-useable.
However what gave Dash a competitive edge was inheriting bitcoin's monetary properties while decoupling a logical aspect of the protocol to provide services. Doing that effectively turned Dash from a gold "nugget" to a gold "coin". (But note that even in the archetype, the gold coin is still solid, not hollow).
The beauty of Dash in this respect is that it's capable of conserving the mining protocol, not at the expense of service provision. It solves many problems at once - for example payment confirmation can be delivered instantly while allowing the mining protocol as much time as it needs to create multiple confirmations. Other "coins" had to speed up the blocktime to to do this and ended up with orphaned blocks all over the place. Dash could also turn the masternode network into a coherent backend for client applications that require realtime consensus. The LLMQ aspect of the network is superbly thought through and orchestrates the service and mining protocols harmoniously to deliver realtime services instantaneously while, again allowing the mining protocol to operate on its own terms.
These are all great innovations. But they're all lost if the primary supply is no longer subjected to competitive mining in the first place. That's where the capital value lies with bitcoin, therefore that's where it lies with Dash. (Why else would you inherit the bitcoin mining protocol). We are not a service. We are a capital asset that's more versatile than bitcoin. It's the archetype.
A service is not unique, you can pick up "fast payments" anywhere, you can pick up "privacy" anywhere, you can pick up "ROI" anywhere, you can pick up "hope" anywhere, you can pick up "decentralisation" anywhere, you can pick up "limited supply" anywhere.
What you cannot pick up anywhere is these three things in combination:
• a highly mined coin consistent with bitcoin's scarcity in terms of effort needed to access the supply
• a highly versatile service-oriented network
• a first mover born in the altcoin boom of 2014
Throw any one of those 3 away and you've got nothing. Reduce the mining element and you just dilute the value of the chain. The services are easily reproducible without the mining and at very low cost. It isn't a question of reward ratio, it's more importantly a question of what proportion of our supply is inflated through competitive effort and what proportion is inflated on a purely nominal basis (like the FED does). We have moved far too far towards the latter IMO.
If competitive mining is considered dispensable, then EVERYTHING is thrown into reverse. We no longer deliver scarcity to the market, we deliver utility. We are a technology (software) product who's utility will be considered as dispensible as we considered our own mining protocol dispensible. We're no longer even competing in the same market sector as our previous contemporaries but rather alongside the newer proof of stake networks who can simply blow us away when it comes to technical versatility since they don't inherit the bitcoin protocol but rather a pure
utility oriented protocol designed from the ground up for service delivery.
In summary, the opinions I'm posting here are no different than those that I've expressed for the last 5 years. I don't need any lessons in how to be "positive about Dash". I still see Dash as having (potentially) a very optimistic future if people screw their heads back on the right way and don't lose sight of what made this project rare and investible in the first place. The only thing that's changed is background narrative.