Altcoin News
DASH Block Size Increase Reaches Consensus in Less Than 24 hours
Scott Fargo | Jan 22, 2016 | 00:50
(North American Bitcoin Conference, Miami, January 21, 2016) – Dash (www.dash.org), the #3 cryptocurrency in the world used for consumer payments (behind bitcoin and litecoin) celebrated its second anniversary of existence on Monday by holding a vote among its stakeholders to increase its blocksize (far ahead of demand) from 1 MB to 2 MB. It passed within 24 hours with 99 percent of the vote.
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Dash Block Size Increase
“With pundits in a panic proclaiming the death of bitcoin and other decentralized cryptocurrencies not backed by a bank or government from a single blog post by a former bitcoin developer who has joined a bank blockchain development consortium, we thought it would be instrumental to show how the superior consensus mechanism in the world’s fastest cryptocurrency can be achieved in a single day through Dash’s decentralized governance protocol where one literally votes with one’s coins,” said Evan Duffield, creator and chief architect of Dash.
Dash (DASH), which currently hovers around $4 per coin and has a $25 million market cap (similar to bitcoin in 2011) vs bitcoin’s market cap of nearly $6 billion, is also completely decentralized but is superior to bitcoin in several ways:
(1) Dash has instant confirmations vs. 10 minutes or more for bitcoin, which makes it superior for person-to-person commerce, bitcoin ATMs (Dash also announced integration this week with the world’s largest maker of bitcoin ATMs, Lamassu). Dash developers discovered a way to “trap” the first trusted miner confirmation and prohibit double-spending, as opposed to the current bitcoin paradigm where hundreds of confirmations take place and many wallets will require as many as six confirmations before the transfer of bitcoins is complete. Until a larger block size is implemented for bitcoin, increasing volume will continue to make transactions take longer on the bitcoin blockchain.
(2) The governance of Dash is hard-coded into its network, so all stakeholders who run a node of 1,000 Dash or more get an instant vote on the future of the network. This week’s vote took less than 24 hours to get a majority of nodes to vote and was passed by an overwhelming majority (99 percent voted yes). This contrasts with the bitcoin protocol, which requires negotiated agreements (in the current case, taking more than a year) to arrive at a consensus and then the further agreement of all miners to accept this.
3) Dash is created through an original mining protocol, x11, which was written by Duffield to keep the “arms race” among miners at bay by making it incredibly difficult to create single-purpose ASIC chips for mining Dash at scale, as is currently the case with bitcoin. This creates an inherently more fair opportunity for “home miners” by eliminating the prospect of massive mining farms in China that have recently been criticized as an inherent weakness in the bitcoin system.
Dash developer Evan Duffield, an American programmer based in Phoenix, is the founder of the innovative cryptocurrency, which now has a robust international user base, including more than half the network nodes of bitcoin itself. Dash was already able to handle four times the volume of bitcoin before this doubling of block size, and it will now be able to handle eight times the volume – and provide instant transactions, instant settlement and enhanced privacy (more similar to cash than is bitcoin as the Dash blockchain does not leave public transaction details) on each transaction.
While Dash developers and proponents believe bitcoin will always hold a great utility for store of value and sending of larger transactions (into the millions of dollars), Dash is immediately a better solution for smaller transactions and microtransactions (the existence of which has slowed down and “bloated” the bitcoin blockchain, leading to its current scaling issues).
Duffield will give a rare in-person presentation at the North American Bitcoin Conference this Friday morning to update the bitcoin community on these developments, as well as to show an early version of Dash Evolution, a mobile-enabled user interface that will make interacting in Dash even easier than before.
About Dash
Created in January, 2014, by American programmer Evan Duffield, Dash (DASH) is a privacy-centric digital currency with instant transactions. It is based on the Bitcoin software, but it has a two tier network that improves it. Dash allows users to remain anonymous while making instant transactions, similar to cash. Dash transactions are almost instantly confirmed by the Masternodes network. This is a great improvement on Bitcoin’s system, where confirmations take much longer because all the work is done by the miners. For full details please visit www.dash.org.
Source: Press Release
Images courtesy of DASH
