Within 8 hours over 1.5 million coins were mined with a very low difficulty due to a "bug".

The governance system requires you to bind up a sizeable amount of coins in master nodes which allows you to vote (and they also continue to earn more coins!). It's easy to centrally control the governance using the instamine. A lot of coins is spent on marketing luring in new users with promising buzzwords (privacy, instant transactions, scaling, governance...). This causes an inflated market cap as a lot of coins are locked into master nodes and are not used to trade or transacted with. It is only interesting if you find ponzi schemes interesting.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=999886.0

If you think that's bad then consider that the creator holds a master key which can force all nodes to reprocess all blocks in the last 24 hours. Yes you read that right.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7293tw/just...

https://github.com/dashpay/dash/blob/master/src/spork.cpp#L7...

the marketing is great though!

edit: [BTC/USD] -> [USD/BTC] && [DASH/USD] -> [USD/DASH]

Maybe I'm calculating this incorrectly, but using the above, I come up with a cost of 75 BTC for 1000 DASH. And given the current BTC price of DASH at coinmarketcap.com[0], I see 1000 DASH would run about 55 BTC.

Either way, it's certainly possible that the purchase was for diversification, if one speculates the initial BTC "basket" was quite a bit larger.

[0] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dash/

Order of magnitude sanity check is ~10 dash for btc, so 1,000 Dash should be on the order of 100 btc.

Was the privacy aspect even tested? The only line I could find was - " I haven’t read much about instant/private send". So was the PrivateSend feature even tested?

Additionally, what does this imply?

"Masternodes are used for instant/private transactions and governance"

Does it mean only masternodes can use the privacy focused feature?

An additional note, can someone please explain me what is so novel about the governance policy other than instead of asking votes from the entire network (ie bitcoin), the votes are focused only in hands of people with enough coin?

No, it means the masternodes provide privacy by mixing your coins. This has privacy implications.

> An additional note, can someone please explain me what is so novel about the governance policy other than instead of asking votes from the entire network (ie bitcoin), the votes are focused only in hands of people with enough coin?

That's the novelty. No it's not particularly useful.

Not only is it a bunch of irrelevant content that makes reading the actual text more annoying because you've got at least one short video looping on your screen the whole time, it also increases the data usage massively. This article transfers over 70MB, with over 50MB of that being from the gifs.

  Domain name: A+
  Content: A
  Everything else: C-