Unlike Bitcon’s still mysterious inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator and lead developer of Dash, Evan Duffield, appears in public. That wasn’t always Duffield’s advantage, at least in the beginning. If the author of a crypto currency is known, he can also be held responsible if something goes wrong.

Wikipedia writes about crypto currencies:

Crypto currencies are money or Fiat money in the form of digital means of payment. They use cryptographic principles to implement a distributed, decentralized and secure digital payment system. To this day, unlike central bank money, they have been drawn exclusively from private sources. However, their qualification as a currency is sometimes controversial. In German-speaking media the term crypto money is also used.

And that is exactly what happened in the first days of the new Altcoin. Money creation takes place differently in digital currencies than in state currencies, namely through a process called mining. In simple terms, this means that Dash users make their computing power available to the network and are rewarded with Dash Coins. Mining thus generates new coins in exchange for computing power. This usually takes place in a limited process; it is not possible to generate any number of payment units within a period, but only in a limited number. But this limit for newly created coins failed at the start of Dash and almost 2 million coins currency units were generated by mining within the first two days after system startup. This corresponds to almost a quarter of the coins currently in circulation (March / April 2017).

This shook confidence in Bitcoin Code

This shook confidence in the still young currency, as the crypto currency market was already traversed by enough „rotten“ currencies. New currencies appeared, their exchange rate was artificially raised, the developers quickly sold their coins and let the projects fall asleep. Many feared similar things with Dash. Evan Duffield spoke of an error called „instamining“ and offered to restart Dash after identifying and correcting the buggy code. But the majority of the Dash community at the time disapproved, as did a general distribution of the coins produced by instamining. Thereupon the initial distribution was maintained, the development of the project continued and Duffield managed to restore confidence in his system. Meanwhile, this crypto currency has become one of the most successful Altcoin currencies (the currency has even managed to secure a top position among the Bitcoin Code alternatives) and has the most active Altcoin community on Bitcoin Talk.

Darksend – Anonymity guaranteed?

One of the special features of Dash is the PrivateSend service. This Coin Join-based transaction service from Dash provides an anonymous method for processing transactions. The idea behind Coin Join is based on the consolidation of individual transactions in which the payments of two or more users are bundled in a single process. An ordinary transaction consists of information about the sender and receiver as well as input and output. With PrivateSend, inputs and outputs are now combined in a block in the blockchain and passed on to the respective recipients. The classic transaction as such disappears. PrivateSend is based on distributed network nodes and allows decimal denominations of the currency (0.01, 0.1, 1 dashcoin,… etc.). The maximum amount of a transaction brokered by PrivateSend is 1000 coins. The merging of the transactions of different users is done according to identical inputs and outputs. As a result, it is almost impossible for third parties to trace the cash flows, since although the inputs and outputs can be viewed, they cannot be assigned to individual users.

Dash Course Development

Despite the difficulties described above, the Dash share price developed positively. In terms of market capitalization, i.e. the total value of the payment units currently in circulation, Dash is currently (March 2017) roughly on a par with Litecoin, sometimes in fourth place, sometimes in fifth place, behind Bitcoin and the second-placed Etherium and Ripple as number three. However, despite the back and forth market capitalization, the Dash price is better than that of Litecoin. The price rose in 15 months, from November 2015 to March 2017, by over 2000%. In other words, a Dasch-Coin that was still worth 2 US dollars in November 2015 could be exchanged for more than 50 dollars after just over a year. In March 2017, the price even rose briefly to almost USD 100.