Dash – also called Digital cash – is an open-source P2P (peer-to-peer) cryptocurrency that aims to be the most scalable in the world. In this article, we will analyse the birth of this crypto, how it works and where to buy it.
Dash: the story of Digital Cash
Evan Duffield first stumbled upon Bitcoin in 2010. From the very first moment, he was extremely impressed by this technology. However, he was not so enthusiastic about the low transaction speed and lack of privacy.
His ideas on how to make Bitcoin work better were never going to be accepted by the team, which would have to change the Bitcoin Core source code. That’s why on January 18th, 2014 he decided to create his own cryptocurrency.
Initially, Dash was called Xcoin, later becoming DarkCoin and finally Dash, a name which stands for Digital Cash.
During the first two days of the launch, 1.9 million Dash were mined, about 10% of the total worldwide supply (18 million). Duffield, the creator and main developer, attributed all this to a bug that was created when Bitcoin was forked, which “mistakenly modified the mining difficulty, using unreal values to calculate the reward”.
After solving this initial problem, Evan proposed to relaunch the cryptocurrency from scratch, but the community did not approve the idea. The development of the project continued even though the initial allocation was wrong. Most of the Dash that were created were distributed to major exchanges at very low prices.
The Dash Core Team, which is responsible for developing the cryptocurrency, has gone from 30 full-time employees to 20 part-time employees and dozens of unpaid volunteers. All Core Team developers are paid by Dash’s payment system and therefore are not dependent on donations or sponsorships that can generate conflicts of interest.
What is Dash for and how it works
In addition to Bitcoin’s unique set of characteristics, Dash currently offers three features:
- Instant Transactions (InstantSend);
- Private Transactions (PrivateSend);
- It manages a self-funded, standalone model that allows the Dash network to pay individuals and businesses to perform a job that adds value to the network. The distributed governance system makes it a decentralised autonomous organisation.
InstantX stands for instant transactions and is the technology that allows transactions to be fully confirmed in just four seconds. InstantX uses the second layer of the Dash network (Masternodes) to produce a block once a transaction has been created on the network. The Dash involved in this transaction are blocked and cannot be spent again; the network will reject any attempt to re-send the frozen tokens.
The Dash client stores the cryptocurrency in the user’s wallet and makes it available for use immediately. The next step is quite complicated and serves to anonymise the cryptocurrency, at which point the user’s coins are sent to the client using a randomly generated address.
When users wish to carry out transactions, the client forwards the amount specified by the anonymous and temporary addresses directly to the address of the designated recipient.
Dash: where to buy it
Dash is a very famous cryptocurrency, currently in the fifteenth position on CoinMarketCap, with a market capitalisation of almost one billion dollars. It is possible to buy Dash on the main exchanges present in the crypto world, namely:
