Dumbed down, that's my forte!
The algorithm is least important, though it has served us well.
The coins are completely fungible, that means that nobody can tell one coin from another, like with Bitcoin, you can tell if coins, have been at a gambling site, or used for drug money (that is if you've identified drug dealers, etc...) which means that places like Coinbase can say "I'm not accepting those, they've been used at a gambling site, which isn't OK with the government!
DASH has DarkSend which mixes, in the wallet, your coins with everyone elses and that keeps them fungible. BUT at the same time, they give you privacy. If you send coins to a merchant, that say, the Government can peek in on, or even a nosy merchant, They know the addresses of the coins you sent to them came from you, but those coins are not going to lead back to a wallet, exposing what else you have in there. They're a dead end.
Instant transactions. You can send someone funds, and they'll get it on average in 4 seconds, ready to spend if they need to!
Now, all this came about because of Masternodes. Masternodes are a secondary network that works along side the miners. They enabled DarkSend and InstantX and they are primed to enable DASH to do so much more in the near future. Right now, though, we're concentrating on making all these technologies better. We have a thing called a reference node, which is a node that keeps track of which masternodes have been paid, and makes sure everyone gets paid before going through the list again. This is centralized. Not because it's impossible to decentralize it but because it was a shortcut to get the other things running smoother (masternode owners were getting grumpy because when taking a chance at the spin of a wheel each time the network chooses a masternode for the round, you may average a certain number of payments, but you can be on the extreme ends not getting paid much at all or getting lots of payments. Masternode owners wanted that straightened out pretty badly, so the refernece node was created, as it was faster and simpler to implement than decentralizing it, which was always in the plans, and is currently being worked out, but like I said was a temporary solution.
Now, the development team has implemented voting. I see a lot of uses for that!
One thing I still want to see done with DASH and it's masternodes, is a decentralized exchange. For me, that's paramount.
Other assets, an extremely hard working lead developer and the rest of the team seem just as enthusiastic and hard working as Evan himself. A great community. Oh gosh, those are the things at the top of my head.
DASH is here, DASH works, DASH is full of Development do-ers.
wow awesome explanation i been away from crypto for like a year and a half but this coin looks to be the best coin to come out last year and defiantly feels like it has a future.
hows the community? i got into dogecoin mainly because of their community i admit the coin has no new technology but the community is still keeping it alive.
ill prob buy 0.5btc worth of this coin not much but i dont want to liquidate all my dogecoin aswell..
also can a laptop mine this and make anything or nah?
In one word, kick-ass!
I first used IRC with a baud 14,000 modem around 1994. This is by far one of, if not the, best self-organizing and supportive communities I've ever encountered. Check out www.dashtalk.org ! Not long before you'll see waves of trolls shouting scam this, instamine that, cult-leader this and the other...
Mining? Na... still totally GPU mineable, but never on a laptop. What you CAN do, is get a share in a Masternode. There are a couple guys who offer that service, I highly recommend Splawik21, Mangled Blue and Moocowmoo, www.node40.com - or if you want to do it yourself and need help, check my link - Having a Masternode is much more lucrative than mining. Even direct competitors are great friends. The community really is very cool. The masternode 2nd tier network is something else, everyone is copying it, its the latest ANN craze... That says a lot too.
Welcome!!