Dash Strategy UpdateHello Everyone,
We’ve seen an increasing amount of interest from many people about where the Dash project is going and what our goals currently are, so we’ve decided to make a comprehensive post detailing the strategy for the next couple of years. This all is subject to change, but should give a good idea of our vision for the crypto space and how we fit into it.
DevelopmentOver the course of 18 months we have built several added value features for users, a system that incentivizes all necessary elements for the long term viability of a crypto-currency network, and more importantly a philosophy of being innovative and disruptive in our pursuit of creating a next generation digital currency platform that learns from the experience of older projects and proposes new ways of doing things.
The current goals of development can be summed up pretty simple by saying that, in the short term, we are focusing on making Dash much more accessible to the general public. This includes an Android wallet, iPhone wallet and a very stable version of the reference client.
We also feel that the development of the client has gotten quite a bit ahead of public awareness of the Dash project and what we’re about. So a large portion of the next 2 years will be a robust campaign to capture the average persons interest and present them with the advantages of our solution. This is going to be accomplished by the brand new concept of Blockchain based-funding.
Development Tools and Process StandardizationAs a decentralized, open source project one of the greatest challenges is coordinating a distributed team and making sure we work according to industry standards. Thanks to the efforts of our project management team we have implemented a full suite of professional tools to ensure delivery excellence.
- JIRA - an industry leading tool - will be used for assisting the development and quality assurance by organizing to-dos and prioritizing issues. It will also be open up to the public so the community can easily help in bug testing/reporting.
- JIRA Service Desk addon will handle community submissions to the teams working on Dash, whether they be bugs, ideas, or suggestions.
- Confluence will be used for both internal and external documentation, with the intention of improving overall project documentation, and having a central place where community members can find information.
- Confluence Questions will be used as a place where community members can ask and answer questions about Dash. It's like a community maintained FAQ, where both team and community members can contribute by answering the questions raised. Combined with the superb search functionality of Confluence this tool can be used as the central place for distributed knowledge related to Dash.
- Bamboo will be used by the development team for automated tests and builds
- The entire platform is professionally hosted by Atlassian with multiple administrators on the team to provide redundancy. There is still a lot of work to do but we are taking firm steps in this direction.
This is part of our commitment to the users, investors and the crypto community to go the extra mile in our effort to make a positive difference in the industry.
Budget and Blockchain based GovernanceBlockchain based governance is a new concept of funding within cryptographic currency, it’s the idea that the currency can fund it’s own development and expansion and at the same time retain its freedom to innovate. Something like a decentralized kickstarter built within Dash, that pays out from the blockchain for projects and investments that the masternode operators, through their votes, see as worthy. (more information, click here)
We plan on having the first proposal funded via this method by early September, after that we’ll allow more and more proposals to be funded through the system along with modest developer salaries for implementing the core technology. Being that the budget system is 100% decentralized, the core team has no direct control of what gets funded, but we feel confident the community will stand behind the core team to implement the following strategy.
Our original thoughts about how this should progress
The developer compensation portion isn’t intended to be something to live off of (although, it could be enough eventually), more as a token of appreciation for anyone that is “core” to the project and donates their time to expanding the quality or reach of the project in general.
We could have the best project in the world, but if no one knows about it then we’ll have no users. We’ll start by a general education campaign targeted at average, somewhat technically savvy users and showing them what our ecosystem has to offer them. There will be a lot of “secret sauce” used to implement our media campaign, as many of our core team members have significant experience building companies and growing them.
Bitcoin and the Blocksize debateIn the last few weeks, a debate has been raging across all Bitcoin discussion forums on whether or not to increase Bitcoin’s block size limit. Actually the debate has been going on for longer than that but the rate and temperature of discussion have been greatly increased more recently.
For the Bitcoin project, both sides are correct in their assumption that the blocksize issue is a real problem. However, they’re stuck in between a rock and a hard place. If they increase the blocksize, they will risk losing more full nodes due to the cost of operating a node, which in turn makes the network less robust and prone to DDOS attacks and other issues. If they don’t increase the blocksize, the network will become increasingly more expensive to send money on and naturally competitors will begin to look more attractive to the general public.
As for our position in this debate, we’re not in any immediate danger and have a plan for how to deal with this issue when it comes up. In fact we’re already planning the tools for how we will support a massive amount of transactions. What if we kept the blocksize limit at 1MB and had a great wallet for general users that used off-chain transactions the majority of the time? As a result we would have a small blockchain, low fees and nearly limitless transaction support. The goal is to stay lean and allow for growth at the same time.
V12 and what to expectThe next version of the reference client includes important changes. It is currently on the public testing stage and we are actively working on it. If you have the time and would like a sneak preview, you can go to our testing thread download the latest binaries and help test it using test Dash.
We expect V12 to be launched onto mainnet in early August, this will be followed by a campaign to get all pools updated then a hard-fork. Soon after that, we’ll start our outreach campaign and implementation of all future technology using the budget system.