Different from robustness or resilience in that the Antifragile system improves with, not withstands, stressors, where the stressors are neither large or small.

The concept of something being self-sustaining is quite remarkable to me. Perhaps it’s that new form of concrete that can fix it’s own crazy, perhaps it’s our shift to renewable energy, for each person this concept means something different. In terms of Digital Cash the concept of self-sustaining is being accomplished by making our blockchain self-sustaining.

…A self-sustaining blockchain you say? How is that possible?…

Like most things in the Dash project this need for an self-sustainability has come directly from watching how other projects have handled decision making process and attempting to improve on it. One thing observed quite early on is that the democratic process of coming to consensus in a large group isn’t always easy. Many different people have many ideas and often what happens is paralysis by analysis. So many smart people debating an idea there isn’t any room left to actually make a decision. To address this we thought long and hard and eventually we can up with the Decentralized Blockchain Governance which was built to address this paralysis by analysis situation. The converse is that Digital Cash is now the first digital currency that I’m aware of that now has a:

…1/4 million dollar development budget at today’s price of $3. At $30 Dash thats 1.4 million a year…

Nope I didn’t stutter. At today’s prices ($3) the masternode operators have agreed to start putting aside ~7000 Dash ($25,000/month) into a fund that will be used to allow the blockchain to be submitted proposals and then the masternode operators can vote on which proposal’s get funded and which proposal’s don’t.

This new development budget is a very good start for creating an Antifragile form of Digital Cash because without constant development, money to fix bugs, and money to pay dev’s software defined money isn’t going to be much use to anyone.

Another example of how Dash is starting to create an Antifragile ecosystem is through it’s deployment of incentivized full nodes otherwise known as Masternodes. Having incentivized full nodes is a fairly new concept in the crypto space. Full nodes are very important to the health of the network as they allow peers to talk and keep up to date. The who/what/why of our incentivized full nodes can be read about in many places so I’ll hold back regurgitating it again.

So we have talked about two possibilities for Dash being Antifragile. The fact that is has a self sustaining development budget and also that it has an entire group (~2600 today) of full node operators. These full node operators all have virtual servers hosting their full nodes, mostly deployed in tier 1 or tier 2 data centers around the world. Having over 2600 full nodes participating in various network services definitely helps but I believe the third example of Antifragility we have is the operators of these nodes. This group of people has come together locked up significant amounts of capital (2600 * 1000 * $3 = $7,800,000) and decided that they support and want to help improve Dash while also gaining some benefit for themselves personally. I think of this group of Masternode Stewarts as a board of director’s that has invested majorly into a company that they want to succeed. They are so heavily invested now that they have even agreed to give up a small percentage of their incentivization so that we can allow the block chain to be self sustaining. For agreeing to give us this portion of the reward they were given the power to control how this value was spent.

Are we an Antifragile crypto currency yet. I doubt it. Are we making steps in the right direction? I hope so. To review I feel we have the following on our side in regards to antifragility:

Self sustaining development budget of 7000 Dash per month, 84,000 Dash per year (84,000 * $3 = $250,000)

Second tier of incentivized full nodes

Group of approx 1500 – 2600 blockchain stewards that have shown their commitment by locking up 2600 * 1000 * $3 = 7.8 million dollars worth of Dash

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile