Dash Community Q&A – August 2019

Each month, the ten most popular questions submitted by the Dash community at Dash Nation Discord are collected and sent to Dash Core Group for answers. The intention is to select important and well-thought out questions and filter out unpopular questions, questions that have already been answered and other noise. Some questions which were not answerd on the quarterly call are answered here as well. The submissions for August 2019 are as follows:
Q: What is the real situation of Dash in Venezuela (past, present and future)?

A (Ernesto & Ryan): Venezuela gets a lot of attention from Dash and the cryptocurrency community as a whole because of its complex geopolitical and economic situation, and what crypto could potentially mean for its citizens. One challenge faced by Dash and other cryptocurrency projects is to define and measure growth in a conclusive manner. This is challenging given the decentralized and permissionless nature of cryptocurrency and the large number of teams working there.

Dash has attained great traction when measured by metrics obtained from sources that can be easily tracked: Active Dash wallets and merchant count, alongside other less specific metrics such as the number of businesses initiating contact with various Dash organizations (including DCG) to include Dash in their payment process. In early 2018, Dash had few merchants and active wallets in Venezuela. Today, Venezuela leads in number of active Dash wallets globally and the highest merchant count for Dash of all countries and any other cryptocurrency.

During this growth period, there were some groups in the Dash and crypto industry that were critical of the communities doing the work on the ground in Venezuela for what they considered exaggerated claims. While we have seen errors made on some of the merchant side of the growth, we have not seen evidence of clear intentional deception during this growth process. We believe the errors were a mix of accelerated growth, inconsistent processes, and desire to show results to the DAO on social media channels. There are many legitimate reasons for outdated or incorrect information, including merchant turnover (e.g., businesses that fail in a shrinking economy), key-person setups in which only the owner or manager could accept Dash payments, employee turnover (with new employees not trained on Dash payments), low transaction counts (causing merchants to stop accepting Dash), movable merchants changing locations (e.g., kiosks / food trucks), or low-quality listings such as a person willing to perform odd jobs being counted as a “merchant”.

Dash’s most popular merchant website is currently revising their standards for merchant listing, and purging lower-quality or unverified listings. While the merchant counts will decline, it does not contradict the growth we have seen in active wallets, Dash website visits, and privately non/disclosed data we see from partner merchant chains, exchanges, and payment providers active in Venezuela.

For the short and middle term future, we foresee continued adoption that builds on existing achievements. While we cannot disclose specific names, we are in conversations with multiple mid and large sized organizations regarding Dash integrations.

We expect Venezuela to continue to grow in importance and, as mentioned in the quarterly call, growth in Venezuela can lead to growth in other geographies were Venezuelans migrate and can utilize the speed and low cost of Dash to send remittances back home.

Some of the different larger teams that have worked there and obtained DAO funds are, in chronological order of creation (Including a brief concept of what they do):
Dash Caracas (Started as a meetup program for Caracas and eventually grew into Dash Venezuela)
Dash Venezuela (Mostly conferences, but also dedicated to training, mass media and community building)
Dash Merchant Venezuela (Merchant onboarding responsible for the largest share of onboarded merchants to Discover Dash)
Dash Maracay (Conferences and education in the City of Maracay)
Dash Help (Call center dedicated to responding questions from anyone in Venezuela and other countries)
Dash Youth (Outreach program dedicated to universities and young entrepreneurs)
Dash Trip Venezuela(Program dedicated to onboarding merchants in touristic destinations in Venezuela)
Dash Text(Software for using Dash in any phone via SMS)
Kriptomobile(Phone manufacturer, sells units preloaded with full Dash ecosystem retailing for under 100 USD in Venezuela and beyond.)
Dash LatAm (Originally Dash Remittances, now expanded reach and are doing merchant adoption, remittance activities into Venezuela as well.)

There are a total of 27 communities in Venezuela, but the above mentioned are the ones we identified as largest and DAO funded.
Q: I have been curious about ChainLocks as it relates to network capacity? Is there any gain whatsoever? I had been thinking that if funds were chainlocked and also immediately respendable (under 4 inputs I understand) that effectively a queue is created and that in a time of full blocks ChainLocks would serve to defer some transactions? This is in addition to its primary purpose of course. (slamdunk)

A (Ryan): While ChainLocks do not increase the total capacity of the network, Chained InstantSend transactions can—in theory—provide a “surge capacity” of unconfirmed transactions that are nonetheless respendable. This depends on the hardware capacity of the masternodes, which tend to be configured to handle a normal network load. We know from stress tests that the typical masternode configuration would need to improve before that surge capacity would be properly supported.

Q: What is the DCG opinion of the presentation of the current site in relation to their own webtext about approachability and friendliness? If (slightly) negative, is there a budget to improve upon the website by hiring a ‘PR/graphics-firm’ to reorganize the website to make it less generic and more visually appealing/approachable for people from all over the world? (fuzzyduck)

A (Fernando): We decided to use a combination of images and illustrations in the website to make it more human and less geeky than the other crypto sites we analyzed. I think we achieved that to some point because the first thing most users will see is a person, not a wallet or an illustration. However, it is true that we still need to improve on the images, illustrations, and even content itself.

For the images we would eventually like custom shots that reflect exactly what we want to reflect on each page, but we don’t have that in the roadmap yet.

For illustrations we would like something more tailored to Dash since it is true that this particular style is becoming too common. We have started working on custom animation videos and one of the things we want is to create a style that will be used both for videos and illustrations.

On a related note, we have recently started to A/B test some changes on the website.We will try to do this for all important ones on a continuous basis so we don’t go into the wrong direction.

Q: On the quarterly call, it was noted that trustless masternode shares are still in the backlog. Implementing this change would have a significant effect on the economic model and incentives behind running Dash masternodes. How will the community and current masternode owners be consulted before such a feature is implemented, will there be an on-chain vote? (Phil7)

A (Ryan): Because trustless masternode shares is in the backlog, and not yet incorporated into a release roadmap, DCG has not yet invested significant resources debating the technical or governance requirements to see this feature implemented. There are economic and technical pros and cons with trustless masternode shares, so it may prove to be a contentious protocol change. If the proposed design generates strong opinions, the network can utilize a decision proposal to resolve the debate. Any specific solution would start as a DIP to gather community feedback as a first step in this process.

Q: What process should a third-party organization go through if it wants to implement its own type of transaction in the Dash blockchain? This applies to Special Transactions that were implemented in the Q1 of 2019. (warriors)

A: (Bob) A third-party organization should create their own DIP explaining the benefits to the network for the implementation of this special transaction. When submitting a DIP, it would be beneficial to have proof-of-concept source code included. The DIP can then be reviewed by the core team and community for comments and consideration. Once comments are appropriately addressed and the DIP is accepted, the third-party should make a pull request in the reference implementation repository.

Q: Is anything known about the initiatives to launch a stable coins on the Dash blockchain (similar to TrueUSD and the like)? (warriors)

A: (Robert) Dash Core Group has no plans to implement stable coins on the Dash blockchain. Our focus remains on Evolution development and promotion.

Q: On coinatmradar.com there are listed 1629 Genesis Coin’s ATM’s but only two of them offer to buy DASH. Any idea how to implement DASH in to the Genesis Coin’s ATM’s? (andrewk)

A (Ryan): As a starting requirement, the ATM itself must be capable of dispensing fiat currency. Genesis Coin ATMs are either cash-in ATMs that only allow buying, or two-way machines that support both buying and selling. Two-way ATM machines cost more to purchase, repair, and service (e.g., loading cash in dispensing cartridges), so many ATM operators forego the cash-dispensing function. It also requires the ATM operator to turn on the cash-out function for each coin. While Genesis Coin offers this functionality on some of their models, the final decision resides with each operator. If you would like more Genesis Coin ATM operators to support selling Dash for physical currency (and the specific ATM you would like to use has the required hardware), the best thing you can do is contact the ATM operator to express support for Dash cash-outs.

User names. How to handle them?

A: (Bob) The implementation for blockchain identities (i.e. user names) is actively being designed at this time. As such it would be premature to share any information as specifics are still not finalized. Look for additional information on the next quarterly call.

https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/community-q-a-august-2019.47965/