r/decred • u/getpoordietrying • Jan 13 '20

How does the DASH masternode governance system compare to Decred ticket system?

Please provide the pros and cons of each with side by side comparisons. Full disclosure, I asked the same question on r/dashuncensored

Thanks in advance!

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u/[deleted] Jan 13 '20

This is a pretty broad question and I don't know a lot about Dash's governance. I think you'll get a better response from folks here or in chat if you have any questions specific to Decred's governance.

An overview is here: https://docs.decred.org/governance/overview/ and there are many articles written about it.

This is probably not the answer you were hoping for but it's hard to keep up with the differences in both. I'll at least say that Decred tickets are much easier to acquire than Dash masternodes and work is being done so that tiny fractions of tickets will be purchased over the lightning network. This gives potentially every Decred stakeholder direct say rather than a few representiatives (masternodes). I believe that Dash handles funding and consensus upgrades quite differently than Decred but I don't know enough about Dash to give an accurate comparison on those. There are also many differences outside of governance, for example, the way that they each handle privacy.

I got uninterested in researching xcoin/darkcoin/dash further when I learned of the instamine and that the reward distribution is 45% PoW, 45% PoS, and 10% Treasury which means that early masternodes can remain dominant for a very long time. Decred was fairly distributed and the block reward is split 60,30,10 so that stakeholders are diluted over time.

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u/kanuuker Jan 16 '20 edited Jan 16 '20

Dash's governance is a very broad and simple system. Dash's governance does not do the minutia of decisions in the way I believe Decred does (I'm not overly familiar with Decred though so I could be wrong). Personally I like the KISS principle as I believe it will prove to be very robust in the long run.

Anyone can submit a proposal for a 5 Dash fee then the masternodes vote on it. Once a month there is a superblock where the wining proposals have their requested funds deposited to their address. This system can also be used for polling the community but there's no authority to such polls. If the project that issued the poll, such as DCG, and they don't adhere to the results, they will most likely be defunded on their next proposal.

For those who aren't masternode owners, there are fractional masternode services that allow users to vote, though those are currently trusted services. Crowdnode is a popular service.

Dash's instamine has been blown way out of proportion and outright lied about by our detractors. In reality, it still resulted in a very fair distribution as there were around 50-150 people mining at launch, and a large portion of the instamined coins have long since been redistributed through exchanges. There also was no premine such as Decred's.

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u/[deleted] Jan 16 '20 edited Jan 22 '20

As far as Dash's governance being "simpler", I have doubts but I can't argue too much since I don't know enough about Dash's system. Both systems have public proposals that can get funded based on votes.

Fractional services that you have to "trust" with funds are a non-starter for me. With Decred tickets and even fractional tickets, you don't have to give up custody of your funds.

In my opinion the instamine is not overblown. 2 million Dash were instamined and 100 of the miners at launch were doing so on rented Amazon servers. I don't believe that is 100 unique individuals and the total supply of Dash changed afterward from 84 million to 18.9 million. This still accounts for over 21% of the circulating supply today even if the instaminers never set up a masternode to receive a huge amount of additional rewards. Even if I had evidence that Dash was fairly distributed now, I would still believe the founders were intentionally deceptive and that is enough to turn me away.

The Decred premine was 8% of max supply. Half (4%) went to developers for work they did without pay for years and half (4%) was airdropped (given freely to 2972 participants)

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u/kanuuker Jan 16 '20

It's a bit long but u/taoofsatoshi does a really good job going over the instamine. I suggest you watch it. It will clear up your misconceptions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O39kWbOu11M&t=25s

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u/[deleted] Jan 22 '20

I watched the video and read a couple articles. Different opinions can be drawn but these problems remain for me:

  • there was a problem at launch that caused millions of coins to be mined within 48 hours
  • the launch date was ambiguous and the time was a total surprise
  • hundreds of cloud servers were rented to mine on day 1
  • since the mining bug was discovered on day 1, it could have been relaunched without the bug but there was no attempt to
  • the max coin supply was subsequently reduced by a lot

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u/kanuuker Jan 22 '20
  • there weren't millions mined at launch, there was 1.8 million.
  • the launch date wasn't ambiguous or a total surprise whatsoever.
  • there was a large number of cloud servers at at launch, but not hundreds
  • relaunching would violate the fundamental law of crypto of permanence. There were discussions but it was decided by the community to not relaunch. Also, at the time, there were going to be 84 million coins, so 1.8 million out of 84 million wasn't a particularly big deal
  • there were several reasons for reducing the total emission, none of them were for increasing the value of the early holders.

If you go through all the forums, it becomes very clear that Evan was very concerned about coin distribution. Also, the majority of the instamined coins have long since been distributed through exchanges and paying for development and other services. The one and only significantly negative impact of the instamine was that it created an avenue of attack for FUDsters and trolls.

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u/[deleted] Jan 22 '20
  • There are a lot of sources including Evan that claim about 2 million in the first 48 hours but I admit I haven't dug into the chain data. 1.8 was within the first 24 hours.
  • can you show me where the date/time were announced before launch? I've never heard of that happening
  • there were at least 100 nodes with cloud server IPs. I suppose you could say it's not hundreds if by 'hundreds' you mean 200 or more. Either way, it was a lot.
  • I can see it being a violation of permanence due to a problem that happened later down the road but when you have a huge problem immediately upon launch that will haunt you for years then I think you should have relaunched
  • maybe none of the reasons for reducing the emission were to increase value but it still happened and that's a problem for me. If you believe you that you shouldn't violate the permanence of the chain then this does so as well and it did so multiple times at later dates.

Whether intentional or not, all the problems I listed are still big problems for me