Dash Community Q&A – Q1 2020 Summary Call

This thread lists questions and answers from the DCG Q1 2020 Summary Call. The first posts contain transcribed answers from the call, and remaining questions will be collected and posted here over the course of the week. Questions are as follows:

1. Q: How important, do you think, is the ability to send Dash to usernames without first having to add each other to contact lists? If any, what are the obstacles that prevent you from having usernames as ‘public tipping address’ rolled out with the initial release of DashPay? (chinmi)

   A (Bob): I’ll answer that as two separate questions. So, how important is it to be able to do that? We did not think that it was the most important to be able to pay to a username without having them be in a contact list. That’s why we prioritized the workflows that have been set up, which is contacts, and contact list management is a separate function from the payment function. We have done that mostly to prioritize security, to make sure that we know that we have two parties accepting a contact request, and that we know that that user name that’s in your contact list is somebody that you know. That obviously prevents you from inadvertently sending funds to a contact that you think the user name is kind of close but it’s off by a character or something like that. We felt like that was the right prioritization of our MVP stories. But having an integrated user experience, where you could go in and say I want to make a payment to a username, and you put in e.g. demodash1 (as we saw earlier today), and it recognizes that that’s not part of your contact list. It then sets up and does the same establishment from a security perspective to validate that user and have them accept you. Then again we’re prioritizing security, but having a more streamlined UX there. So that was something that we didn’t want to build into MVP, but will likely be a very fast follower for us. We think it’s important but we didn’t think that it was the most critical.

   As far as public tipping addresses go, really we have two things there. One is how do we tip? And can we do it in an easy manner and in a public manner. So obviously if developers want to put their public key address on a footer and say, hey send me a tip if you guys like what I did or if you like this code, that seems like that’s the typical use case around it. We’ll see in a traditional payment platform somebody says, hey here’s my Venmo address, send me a dollar. So there are specific use cases for it. We don’t think it’s the most common use case, and so again that’s why it wasn’t necessarily in MVP. There are several ways that public tipping could be set up. Again, we want to make sure that we know who that’s being sent to, and that people can accept it. Obviously as you manage public personas, if contacts are to remain private, different people have different levels of comfort in how those usernames are addresses might be out there. Obviously all the wallets will still have the traditional methods. So a QR code can still be put out there, we could still use other addresses, but we’ll see those coming in after MVP.

2. Q: Will we see Dash Platform on mainnet before Q3 this year? (splawik)

   A (Bob): Before Q3, the answer would be no, because that would mean it would have to be delivered this quarter. This question was submitted prior to seeing our roadmap and the progress chart against the major components. What you saw today was what will be left over at the end of Q2 to continue to develop. What I’ve been doing, and I feel really comfortable doing, is saying one: when can we get to testnet? And then secondly: making sure that I’m making commitments for this quarter and where I feel comfortable going to the next quarter. So the next quarter, meaning Q3 at this point in time, I’m not comfortable saying that it will definitely be on testnet in Q3. What I am comfortable in saying is that we’re managing the scope very rigorously. The entire team because we wanted to get to testnet as quickly as possible, and so I think we’ve all provided as good of an insight as anyone has today. We want to make sure that the product is well suited for the purpose at hand. So, no, it won’t be out before Q3. But as you saw again in the presentation there is a very small set of tasks left to do after after Q2 of this year, so I’ll leave it at that for today.

3. Q: Will DCG look into submitting a budget proposal to have at least 1 DCG team member working full-time on product adoption in Venezuela?

   A (Fernando): Not in the short-term. As we just saw, we have a new and more detailed strategy for Venezuela. Some of those actions are already going on, some will start in the next few weeks. Those costs are paid with business development and marketing budgets, and that’s what we will do for the foreseeable future. This is just one more market where Dash is trying to achieve things, so we don’t see a reason to separate it completely from the others. It’s a multi-budget and multi-department effort. Having said that, we have our Head of Business Development Ernesto Contreras who is himself Venezuelan, so we have a very deep understanding and knowledge of the market, which is great for us obviously. We also have a lot of great local teams with whom we are going to get more involved in the near future. We’ve started to get more involved with them so we can all work in a more coordinated fashion, as Ryan detailed before. So we are not hiring someone separately, but it will have a bigger share of our time and budget in the next few months.

4. Q: Request for an update from DCG on any proposal(s) to change the percentages of block rewards and/or the treasury. (Amanda B. Johnson)

   A (Ryan): As I said earlier, this is a very meaty topic requiring a great deal of explanation and depth of analysis to really create the backdrop for the decisions that were made and what we’re proposing to the network. I am going to be holding a separate video conference with the community to share that information and then answer any Q&As associated with it. Specific dates will be released here within another week or two.

5. Q: What are the teams thoughts around introducing smart contracts? There are just so many beneficial elements that are derived from the ability of entrepreneurs to utilise smart contracts that I would think giving developers the option to utilise should outweigh any downside risk. (itscrazybro)

   A (Bob): Our team is generally interested in adding smart contract functionality to the platform. We think that that would be helpful at some point in the future. Obviously we’ve all had the benefit of looking at smart contract implementations in other projects, and we see the benefits of them, so we don’t need to be be sold on that. I think the usability of them, how ……………

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Author: Strophy
Original link: https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/community-q-a-q1-2020-summary-call.50039/