 You are watching The Daily Decrypt. Welcome to currency competition, friend. I'm your host, Amanda, and today's episode is brought to you by BitJoy. Many of our viewers are curious to learn more about Dash. We've reached out to lead developer Evan Duffield, who has granted us this interview. Well, hello and welcome to The Daily Decrypt, Evan Duffield. How are you? Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm doing great. How are you? I'm good. I imagine that you are back home recovering from your presentation at the Miami Bitcoin conference. Yeah, the conference went fantastic. We had conversations with two or 300 people. We were just busy all of the time. And you literally couldn't get into the conference room without, you know, passing a spy. And then there's the giant soda machine. So we just attracted all of the attention. It was a lot of fun. So you staked out a good spot. That's neat to hear. And now at a Bitcoin conference, I would be interested to know, were there any other currencies other than Bitcoin, other than yourselves, their marketing as well, or were you the only ones? We were definitely the only one. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, we were looking around, looking for Ethereum or, you know, Faptum or any of the other ones. None of them were there. So would you mind providing us a brief introduction of Dash, but also why Dash was created? The Dash project is a fork of the Bitcoin project. As a fork of Bitcoin, we inherit all of the compatibility with their ecosystem. And it's really important because there's really nice SPV wallets, which are simple payment verification. It's all of the mobile devices that everyone uses. If you were to start a brand new cryptocurrency and you didn't fork it from Bitcoin, you would have to basically reimplement all of that work that's been done over the last years. So that's a definite advantage of being a fork of Bitcoin. The whole purpose behind the Dash project was that early on when Bitcoin was, you know, getting its roots and kind of figuring out what it wanted to be, Andreas Antonopoulos and a lot of the early proponents of Bitcoin were talking about more philosophical things. And this is when I got interested in it. They were talking about fungibility and what a payment network should be and what it shouldn't be. When the Bitcoin network made its decision to go in one direction, I saw a completely different direction that wasn't being explored at all. That's the direction of having a completely fungible coin where you can't trace people's history through it. This is important because we don't want people to be spied on on our network. Over time, let's say you have 10 million, 100 million users and even a trillion dollars of commerce happening, there's going to be giant companies mining this data and then they will sell it for profit to people, you know, like larger companies all around the world that are trying to figure out how to advertise to crypto people or governments that are trying to spy on people, things like that. And in a public ledger, it's a worse problem than it was, you know, with centralized companies. And so we have to either decide whether we want to be completely public and essentially everyone's checkbook is just out there on the internet and you can go through it and see everything that they bought. And that's the future that Bitcoin is going toward if it doesn't implement any type of anonymity or privacy enhancing software. So that was the original idea behind Dash. And then when when I started figuring how to do that, I was also thinking about, well, what else could you do? I noticed the full node count was crashing constantly over a period of years. And I related that to the bandwidth that was going through the network because it seemed like they were inversely correlated. And so I also was trying to think of economic solutions to that so that we could have full nodes being incentivized. And then if you incentivize people to run the infrastructure for the Bitcoin network, then you you can have a stable foundation to grow on. And I come from the background of thinking that altcoins were supposed to be test beds for innovation and development within the space. And eventually, if you show something works well enough and you prove an unproven model, then maybe it can make it into the Bitcoin project or maybe it starts a few other projects and spurs other innovation. And so that that's kind of why I invested myself into this to try to see what I could do and test some of these theories that I had. And that that's where the second tier came out of. The second tier is essentially a fully incentivized first tier. So the first tier is tier of undifferentiated full nodes in the Bitcoin network. The Bitcoin network doesn't really care which or it doesn't identify who's running which node. It makes no makes it doesn't really make any any differences between these different full nodes running all around the network. And on our second tier, you can actually identify it with collateral. And then that collateral is essentially how you get entered into a payment queue and paid every few days. And then that's how you're able to pay for the service that you're providing to the network. You can pay for your hosting. There's also profit incentives and and things like that. So that was the general idea there. And then based off of that, we implemented instantaneous transactions. Which allows you to confirm payments in one to four seconds on our network. Our instant transactions available on any of dashes mobile mobile wallets at this type. Yeah, I think they're actually available on all of them now. So we have an available on Android, iPhone, actually to Android wallets and one iPhone wallet. But I must have the Android wallet that I guess I haven't upgraded or or the one I got is not the one that offers instant X. So I'll have to look into that. Yeah, so we just did that actually right before this conference. So there's an update on the app store for that the hash engineering did, which is probably the one you're running. And there's a whole new wallet for Android as well that is pure instant X. So you could check that one out as well. All right. Besides that, the wallets will not let you receive instant X though. They'll let you receive it. They just can't tell it was instant X. OK. So we're working on that too. Because we want people to be able to do, you know, decentralize the commerce with us. Imagine face-to-face transactions where you walk into a store and buy a coffee mug from someone. Yeah. Things like that. It seems like a pretty reasonable goal to be a currency to be usable as a currency to replace current currencies. Yeah, exactly. And to compete with credit cards, we need that as well. Because credit cards authorize in a few seconds. If you're familiar with the way they work on the back end, they take days to settle. But, you know, no one thinks of that. They just know that you walk through and you swipe and then you just move on your way. Right. No one thinks of that except the merchant who's like, oh, another person paying with card? Like, I really wish they would pay with cash. Yeah. Well, and Dash is much more similar to cash in that way. If everybody started accepting Dash, they would receive the full payment. There's no charge backs. There's no percentage that's taken by the credit card company. And that, I think, empowers the merchants in a way that we hadn't seen before. Sponsored shout-out from the Dash guy, Jake, who digs currency competition as much as we do. So much so that he built the DailyDecrypt.com for us. Jake's prices are quite competitive for web design. And he works at an even steeper discount for Dash. You can see his portfolio, blog, and Dash-specific resource directory at theDashGuy.com. I today wanted to speak with you more about Dash Evolution and specifically its third tier. So Dash Evolution is this concept where we already have the first tier, and then we have the second tier built on top of that. And the second tier was designed originally for mostly just currency-related things. So we have fungibility built into it. We have instant transactions. And then they also provide the governance, the funding of the currency, and just the general direction and infrastructure for running such a large project. So now we need to figure out a way to incorporate users into this model and give them a place to live on in the ecosystem. And so I think the best way that I could think of of doing that was to have them hosted in the second tier itself. And so with these collateralized full nodes, you can actually shard the storage up. And then you can save user profiles, private data, and other things like that on the network itself. And this is just pure storage just for the network. This would never be sold to outside companies or anything like that. And basically, the prototype was a really simplistic version of this concept. So we had an Ethereum fork, and then we took that and integrated it with DAPI. And DAPI at this point is just another application. It's Python. It runs on the master node itself. And then it sends messages between the third tier and the dash D. And so that's pretty much all the prototype was. And it allowed you to log into the actual application using DAPI and then invite people and just see kind of how the flow would work differently than a normal cryptographic currency. And now by DAPI, you are referencing decentralized API, meaning the master node quorum that can be queried. Kind of. OK, so DAPI is the decentralized API. Like you said, it heavily relies on quorums. Quorums can actually be used for anything. So for example, say you want to get the Apple stack stock price, you could use a quorum, which is a random set of 10 master nodes of the total 3,500. And these 10 individually go out and get feeds from different services on the internet, getting stock prices. They come back together. And it's basically a group action where they compare their data, they all sign the data they got, and then they send a group message back to the user saying, here's the stock price of Apple. And so what the decentralized API does is they can only do actions on the network when they're group actions and they agree. And so it's just built completely on that premise. So yeah, it uses these decentralized quorums. They could also be thought of as decentralized oracles because they can pretty much do anything, but they have to do it together. So these master nodes acting as togetherness, together quorum groups, they would be querying centralized APIs, but as long as they all agree, then that's how they can come to an answer. Yeah, exactly. And since the selection of them is pseudo-deterministic, the randomly selected, and that's a really long way of saying, you take the proof of work and there's a lot of entropy in the proof of work. Although it's a really low number, if you look at any proof of work hash, you'll see all sorts of random digits at the end of it. We take that entropy and then we seed a random number generator and then we get 10 master nodes based off of that. And so those 10 master nodes, no one could have figured out which tenant would have been because it takes the entire network to compute that hash. So the master nodes are chosen by whatever the digits of entropy end up being generated by the proof of work per block. Yeah, precisely. And then every action is based off of that. So we inherit the security of proof of work, but then we can pretty much do anything we want. We can do anything a centralized service could do. So anytime you need to go out and you can't quite figure out a way to do something in a completely decentralized way, you could use decentralized oracles to fill the gap because these technologies are really hard to figure out how to implement these things. But when you have the second tier technology and you can get master nodes together and have them do these really simplistic actions that add a lot of value to the system, you can do all sorts of things you couldn't do before. All right, so how would a master node check the Apple stock price? Is this something that will come as just as a built in part of the master node node software or does that require user engagement? How do they check these things? I was thinking eventually maybe we could have a decentralized oracle implementation. So you would reach out to the network and say, I would like to do X or Y or Z and one of those could be checking stock prices. One of those could be creating an option on the network for a bet or pretty much anything that you could imagine. And then the master nodes themselves, they're just following what the programming language says to do. And so they would take the commands from the network and then they'd figure out if they were supposed to be involved in that specific action or not. And then generate the data needed and then return it to the user. All right, so this would basically be software based. It's something that the core version of Dash could tell master nodes to go and fetch these kinds of information. Yeah, exactly. OK, so then with this kind of functionality, are we talking, I mean, does this eventually lead to the ability for like smart contracts? Or what does this lead to? I think what you could do is, I don't think the Dash network should go into providing smart contracts directly. Instead, what we could do is provide decentralized oracle services for other smart contract vendors because there's no one else doing that and they all will have to rely on a centralized medium that they go to and then they get the data from and they have to trust that. But if you just relied on the Dash network as your oracle, then everything start to finish could be decentralized for all of these smart contract vendors. But it just shows the power of the second tier. Right, right. This is, you know, way, way far out from kind of where evolution is going. Yeah, let's go back then. Let's climb a little bit back out of the rabbit hole. Let's talk more evolution, Evan. Yeah, so evolution is just a way of making crypto a lot more friendly. And the thought process behind this is that, you know, a lot of the crypto need to be more friendly. Evan, you don't think strings of 24 digits that look like alien language? Tell us why crypto needs to be more friendly. Well, I like the alien language strings, but, you know, I think that most people wouldn't. And, you know, when I talk to my mom or my sister, people that kind of understand crypto, but they're not comfortable with it at all, they keep having to come back to me or they have to Google and try to figure out what's going on. And it's these types of little problems that we basically inherited from the complexity of crypto in general. And that's kind of what I want to get rid of. There's some other providers that are doing the same thing, other vendors that are getting rid of the complexity, but they're doing it in a centralized way, like Coinbase, for example. I would love if we could make something like the Coinbase system but completely decentralized where no one controlled it. That's the general premise. So Dash, if all goes as planned, will feel like PayPal, but will still be Dash. Yeah, precisely. The PayPal systems really need to because you can send to people by email. If they already have an account, they just log in, their money's right there. It's directly attached to a bank account, which is really neat. I don't think we can do that without being a money transmitter. So we'll have to work out a way around that as well. But just the general flexibility of the PayPal system, even though they're completely relying on centralization, is just super neat. All right, let's shift gears a little bit. I want to talk about will Darksend still be a part of the Dash client and protocol once evolution's user names are implemented? The Darksend protocol is going to receive a lot of attention over the next few months and be revamped a little bit to try to make it a lot quicker. Yeah, I missed it once and I struggled a bit. I will say that I struggled a bit and yeah, okay. Yeah, how long did it take you to mix coins? Okay, so I think it took like 24 hours to mix the coins and like I think it cost more than I thought it would. Yeah, so it's not actually supposed to cost that much money and 24 hours is about the average for mixing coins on the network currently, but that will improve over time. It's a lot faster when there's a lot of users. So even if we didn't do anything to the Darksend process in a year, two years, five years, it would be a lot faster than it is now but it would still be as expensive as it was for you. The other thing is that the reason that it takes so long is because the masternodes are aware of who is mixing on them and so we go through multiple masternodes. You can't follow the trail. You'd have to control every masternode that you made contact through throughout the entire process to follow the mixing and the solution to this is what we call masternode blinding where each masternode has no idea of which inputs belong to which users, right? Okay. And then all we need to do is one round of mixing at that point, which would make it, instead of taking 24 hours, would probably be at something like an hour. Okay. That would be much, much better. Instead of, it would also reduce the cost by 24 times because of all of these sessions happening and it would reduce the bloat on the network as well. So this is kind of the direction where we're going in. The way that we're gonna do it is we're gonna provide a web service where all you do is you reach out to a web service and you say, I would like to mix coins and then it does the mixing on your behalf and then it just asks you to sign whenever it's ready for a session to be mixed. So you could do that from a device like a phone or whatever. That, yeah, that's what I was going to ask. Could this be done from the phone? Yeah, yeah. So that's in the roadmap as well. And that's actually completely compatible with evolution. So we'll still have the same functionality as we have currently even on the cell phone. Now I have a question for you that was actually left by one of the Daily Decrypts viewers on our last video that had to do with Dash which was in that particular instance, how Dash's masternodes voted to up the block size cap over the course of 24 hours. And the question that was left in the comment section was basically, you know, like now that Dash is worth, you know, like probably double what it was when the masternode collateral amount was set at 1,000 Dash might that be reduced? This is a question I'm posing to you. Okay, so we've had this question numerous times. I bet. And there's two ways of thinking about this. One is the accessibility of buying a masternode. And from the investor perspective, I completely understand where they're coming from. They want a masternode because masternodes are neat and they would still like to provide services to the network but they can't afford, you know, the current, what is it, $4,000 or $5,000 right now. Yes. And that's one side of the argument. The other side over here is the infrastructure argument. We're aiming for a certain amount of full notes on the network to provide a level of service to essentially our customers, which are all of the users all around the world. And from this perspective, we targeted about 3,000. And so if we cut the collateral down in half, we would instantaneously start our way up to twice the amount of full notes. So it's great if you need more full notes. It's bad if you need more robust full notes, which let's say I wanna add 10 gigabytes of storage per full note. Yes. We probably couldn't do that if we cut the collateral down to 500. But we might be able to do that if the profitability of running these goes up to, you know, $100 a month or something like that because then we're gonna end up taking away from the profitability and providing a higher level of service to the customers. So in other words, it's kind of, it's in the model where we're airing toward the side of aiming at 3,000 full notes that will grow with the network as the network needs more services. So let's say we get to one megabyte blocks. At that point, we would probably have a market cap, you know, a lot higher, probably order of magnitude higher than it is now, which means the profitability of running these notes is at least an order of magnitude higher as well. So I don't know, I think it's like $30 a month or something, so it'd be like $300 a month. Well, at $300 a month, now we might be able to run fully dedicated hardware per master node, you know, and those could be dual core, quad core, three, four gigahertz machines. Then we have a really powerful infrastructure to rely on. And I think that's what we're going for. So the collateral is definitely not gonna get reduced until we have a need for more servers essentially because our each server is supporting too many users. So in this scenario, it is not more is inherently better, but rather as long as you've met your 3000 goal, the first focus is quality rather than quantity. Yeah, precisely. All right. Well, I think that covers what I wanted to talk to you about today. Is there anything that you would like to add? No, nothing off the top of my mind. All right. Well, thank you for your time, Evan, and I am sure we will talk again in the future. Yeah, thank you. All right, bye-bye. Bye. 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