Welcome!

Please describe your thoughts about the proposal on the DashTalk.org. You can watch voting dynamic here.

Gist of the proposal

We propose a change of the current X11 mining algorithm in order to prevent inevitable centralization of DASH network through supplant of numerous and friendy community of regular miners- enthusiasts with a really narrow and exclusive group of brand new ASICs users. Mining centralization spoils Bitcoin network a lot nowadays, we don't want to repeat the same scheme here in DASH.


Why?

Mining in cryptocurrencies serves two main purposes:
1) initial incentivisation new users to come in and bootstrap the network growth;
2) securitizing the network (decentralization).

At the dawn of X11 implementation this algorithm was new and unique. It helped our network to survive in wild cryto jungles while it was a newborn child. It protected us from attacks of more powerful network miners like bitcoin miners and ASICs. But nobody can stop the progress from happening. So now we have new threat for our decentralization, ASICs. Invisibly and secretly they creeped here. Price of the ASICs that are publicly listed on the market for the moment (and therefore are already outdated in their performance) is 20 times higher than price of regular videocard (GPU). ASICs have 8 times higher hashrate per USD than GPUs have. Energy consumption per USD is pretty much the same. Next generation of ASIC will be more and more expensive, and that fact will squeeze out more and more ordinary miners from the DASH community. We described just few bad consequences of ASICs introduction. Let's give you more of them.


Harm of the ASICs:

- minimum 8 times decrease in the network attack costs for an adversary;
- long term price decrease, even with the possibility of temporal peak;
- decreased numbers of live human beings involved in the community, increased threshold to opt-in for ordinary miners, massive miners migration to ASIC-resistant currencies such as Ethereum;
- narrow group of people which secretly uses latest generation of ASICs will get up to 45% of all blockrewards from the network. They can supplant the rest of the miners (GPUs and old ASICs) gradually without even visible peak in the network overall hashrate;
- the same narrow group can easily buy new masternodes instead of dumping their reward on exchanges, so that they can corrupt the governance by lobbing its will,
- centralization of the network, increased possibility of attacks via raw force or financial seizure of big mining farms.


Pros for algorithm change

+ increased security, increased level of decentralization
+ increased popularity, new users to come
+ really huge resonance in the world of crypto. DASH could be the first cryptocurrency in the world which decides in decentralized way that it should become ASIC-resistant again. News titles could be something like that: "Collective mind of DASH proved to be smarter than ASIC manufacturers", "DASH didn't give up like Bitcoin", "DASH is stronger than ASICs", "DASH hits back" and so on.


Pool centralization

There is pool centralization threat also. It is not the object of this proposal though. Maybe in future we will bring this problem as an proposal too. Moreover, we hope that someone else will do it before us. Indeed, security and network decentralization should be a very hot topics here.


What do we want?

We want really detailed discussion of the problem within DASH community. We should consider all pros and cons of the possible solutions to it. Please describe your thoughts about the proposal on the DashTalk.org.

We have detailed publication on the topic here, but unfortunately it is in Russian language. Sorry for my poor English, I'm not native speaker.