What is Dash? — a short guide
What is Dash? It’s a cryptocurrency. At it’s simplest, Dash is a form digital cash you can send over the internet to a friend or retailer without a middleman like a bank.
Read: What is cryptocurrency?
Dash began its journey in 2014 and is currently the sixth largest cryptocurrency in the world by market cap — behind Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, IOTA, and Ripple. But how is it different from Bitcoin, what are its advantages, and how much does it cost? You’ll find answers to these questions and more below.
Dash vs Bitcoin
Dash is similar to Bitcoin in many ways. You can use it to make purchases online or hold on to it as an investment. It also runs on a publicly disclosed blockchain that records each transaction.
Read: What is a blockchain? – Gary Explains
But Bitcoin has its share of problems Dash is trying to solve. Speed is one of them. Dash transactions are confirmed in four seconds, while sending Bitcoins to someone can take 10 minutes or more.
Then there are the fees. The average Bitcoin transaction fee is around $6, compared to only $0.4 you have to pay to send someone Dash. But the fee will increase when more people start using the cryptocurrency.
A big problem with Bitcoin is also that it doesn’t have a governance structure. This means important changes can’t be made without a hard fork that brings a new cryptocurrency to the market, which is how Bitcoin Cash was born. Dash is different. It has a voting system in place so that important changes can be implemented quickly.
Unlike Bitcoin, Dash is self-funding. 45 percent of newly created Dash goes to the miners, and 45 percent to masternodes. The rest — 10 percent — goes to a treasury for funding the development team, marketing, customer support centers, and so forth.
There are a few other differences between the two cryptocurrencies, but these are the major ones.
What are the advantages of Dash?
Two of the biggest advantages of Dash are the speed and low fees already mentioned above. You can send money to anyone in the world for less than $0.4 in four seconds — try doing that through a bank.
Another benefit is anonymity. Although all transactions are public, you don’t have to share personal info like your name and address. However, this can also be a drawback. Dash, Bitcoins, and other cryptocurrencies that provide anonymity have been used by criminal organizations because the money can’t be traced back to them. Some claim their popularity among bad guys is one of the main reasons we’ve seen such a large increase in their value so far.
How to buy, store, and spend Dash?
Buying Dash is easy. You can get it the same way as many other cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin. Make an account on an exchange like BitPanda or Kraken and buy Dash with your local currency.
There are also a few locations in the US where you can buy Dash from an ATM. It’s the easiest way to get the cryptocurrency, although the fees are high. If you live in Austria, you can buy it at over 400 Post branches and about 1,300 Post partners.
How can you store Dash? You keep the cryptocurrency in a digital wallet, one of which you can download from the company’s website. The alternative is to keep it in a hardware wallet such as the Ledger, which is a much safer method due to the reduced risk of getting hacked.
Businesses that accept Dash include hosting providers, online casinos, and even advertising agencies.
Where can you spend it? Dash isn’t as acceptable as standard currencies like dollars and euros, but there are many businesses that have embraced it. These include hosting providers, online casinos, and even advertising agencies — see full list here. You can also use it as an investment, which we’ll talk more about in the next section.
How is it created and how much does it cost?
Dash is created through a process called mining, same as Bitcoins. Mining requires specialized computers that search for solutions to difficult math problems. If the solution is correct, a new block is added to the blockchain and the miner is rewarded with some of the Dash created.
How much does a Dash cost? Its price goes up and down all the time as a result of supply and demand. At the time of writing, you can get one for around $690 — though the exact value of Dash can be seen in the updated widget below. This makes it far less valuable than Bitcoin, which currently costs around $15,800 per piece.
Dash has proven to be an excellent investment so far, as its value has been increasing ever since its introduction. For example, if you had invested $1,000 at the beginning of 2014 when one Dash was worth $0.3, you would have $2.3 million today. Cryptocurrencies have made people into millionaires in a short period of time, which is why everyone is talking about them these days.
If you bought $1,000 worth of Dash at $0.3 per coin in 2014, you would have $2.3 million today.
But before you get too excited and go online to buy Dash, keep in mind that investing in cryptocurrencies is risky. Sure, most of them have increased in value in recent years, but that doesn’t mean the trend will continue. The price can go down as fast as it went up, so make sure to never invest more than you can afford to lose.
There you have it. These are some of the basic things about Dash. Will it become an important part of our daily lives in the future? No one can be sure, especially because there are many cryptocurrencies on the market — over 1,000. Not all of them will be able to survive, although it looks like Dash is on the right path for now.
Have you ever used Dash or any other cryptocurrency? Let us know in the comments.
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