Despite all the sunshine though, there’s still the big fat volatility elephant in the room. The Dashers are doing everything they can to increase user friendliness, but if the value of my Dash Stash is swinging wildly up and down, no amount of classy UI is going to make that feel nice.

How is anyone supposed to actually use this stuff if they can’t afford to lose 20% of their money in a week?

My assumption is that as Dash volatility slips below the volatility of a particular country’s fiat currency, then it will become a viable alternative, and Dash will be there waiting with all their user-friendly ducks lined up. I know they’ve got quite a lot of activity in Venezuela, and with Kuvacash in Zimbabwe.

I’d love to hear the Dash team’s thoughts on the matter of volatility.

A decentralised autonomous organisation

An interesting thing about Dash is that they’ve actually been operating as a DAO for quite some time, and things are ticking away nicely.

It’s interesting to me that a DAO is like a super-efficient version of a government department. 10% of the coins that come from mining go to the treasury, just like taxes flow into a department. And the DAO then has a pool of money that it must decide how to spend, based on proposals and voting of the peoples.

So, Dash has a few million dollars (USD) rolling in each month to spend on salaries and marketing and cakes and whatnot. You can browse through all the proposals and bask in the glory of an open organisation.

A good example of the whole process is the Dash 101 video series. You can see the proposal here — some dude said “I’ll make some videos with pretty girls explaining Dash in a few languages for about $35K, mkay?”. The Dash Masternodes conferred, then responded “mkay”.

The verdict

There’s only one concern I have with Dash, as an investment: it used to be #7 in rank and now it’s #14.

I suspect this is because it’s a little bit boring compared to the other kids in the top 20. It’s the sleeper cryptocurrency that’s just plugging away creating something great while the crypto-enthusiasts are all staring at Tron and EOS having a break dancing battle in a tea cup in a spherical cage with motorbikes zooming around them.

So, this week I will try and move $500 worth of Bitcoin into my Jaxx wallet then shape-shift it right into Dash without even opening a browser window.

That’s it!

Since I actually went outside this week and shared a social encounter, I had very little time to write this up, and no time to check for typos.

Oh wait, that’s another thing I meant to write about. Dash has so few typos in their docs! It’s great. For memory there was one in their glossary under ‘transactions’.

Next week, I’m going to look at something in the top 20. Maybe NEM. Is that still a thing?

Hey, thanks for reading folks, I hope each and every one of you is having a nice time with your life.

You can just carry on reading with next week’s instalment, if you like.