Is Dash (DASH) a Good Speculative Cryptocurrency?
Dash (DASH) the cryptocurrency formerly known as XCoin and Darkcoin, is suddenly hot. Hyperinflation in Venezuela is driving the altcoin to new heights.
“We are seeing tens of thousands of wallet downloads from the country each month,” Ryan Taylor, the CEO of the Dash Core Group, told The Business Insider. “Earlier this year, Venezuela became our No. 2 market, even ahead of China and Russia, which are huge into cryptocurrency right now.”
Taylor claimed 200 Venezuelan merchants a month are signing up to use DASH in their businesses. The merchants obviously want to avoid the crazy economic policies of their President Nicholas Maduro.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has forecast a one million percent hyperinflation rate for Venezuela in 2018. Venezuelans are desperate to protect their assets from hyperinflation and Maduro’s scheme to convert their fiat currency into an oil- and gold-backed cryptocurrency.
Maduro made matters worse with a 96% devaluation of the Bolivar fiat currency on 17 August 2018, Reuters reported. I have to wonder if Maduro himself is speculating in DASH.
Dash (DASH) Shows How Cryptocurrency Cashes in on Inflation
Dash demonstrates that cashing in on inflation and hyperinflation is profitable for cryptocurrencies.
DASH was now the 13th most popular cryptocurrency with a $1.553 billion Market Capitalization and a 24-hour Market Volume of $198.507 million on August 29, 2018. Those numbers created a Coin Price of $187.44 on the same day.
Speculators should take note because many countries including Russia, Colombia, Brazil, China, most of Latin America, India, and most of Africa are highly vulnerable to inflation. To add icing to the cake those nations are experiencing growing smartphone and cryptocurrency use.
Digital currencies are popular in China, East Africa, and in South America. Therefore there is a market for DASH.
What is Dash (DASH)?
The Dash (DASH) is one of the older cryptocurrencies it began in 2014 as a fork of the Bitcoin (BTC) software. Over the years, Dash had three names; Darkcoin, Xcoin, and DASH.
Today, DASH is an open-sourced peer-to-peer (P2P) cryptocurrency that operates upon a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). The DASH DAO comprises a network of 4,942 masternodes the Masternodes are entities that transmit DASH through the blockchain.
The true purpose of DASH is to build an independent P2P payment system that operates through the blockchain. This system features its own mining pools and reaches numerous online merchants.
It is possible to buy digital products with Dash (DASH) including gift cards, games, and products from a wide variety of web stores. The gift cards are why people in Venezuela are interested in DASH.
News reports indicate people in Venezuela buy gift cards with cryptocurrency. They use the gift cards to purchase goods from online merchants in the United States. The merchants ship the merchandise to Venezuela where they use or sell it.
Cryptocurrency and gift cards enable merchants and middle-class citizens to conduct business in Venezuela without the Bolivar. Those people have seceded from the national economy.
I can’t imagine any effective government allowing that situation to continue. Therefore, Venezuela’s government may no longer have the power to enforce its own laws.
That opens the door for widespread use of DASH which would increase the cryptocurrency’s volume and value.
DASH’s Incredible Potential
DASH’s potential for growth and widespread use is great because they designed it as a peer-to-peer P2P money transfer mechanism. Such mechanisms enable anybody to send and receive money with a smartphone.
Therefore, DASH might be the perfect cryptocurrency for the developing world. Smartphone usage is exploding in developing in nations plagued by cash shortages and inflation.
Statista projected the number of smartphone users in India’ to increase from 339.95 million in 2018 to 442.5 million by 2022. I project the number of mobile phone users worldwide to surpass five billion in 2019 and the number of smartphone users on Earth will exceed 2.1 billion according to Statista.
Dash (DASH) would be perfect for Remittances
A logical use for DASH will be remittances, the cash emigrants in developed nations send to folks back home in developing countries. The volume of remittances to low and middle-income countries in 2017 reached $466 billion, the World Bank estimated. The remittance volume grew by 8.5% in 2017 it was $429 billion in 2016.
Remittances to high-income nations are also increasing. Total global remittances increased by 7% in 2017, rising from $573 billion in 2016 to $613 billion in 2017.
A major advantage to a solution like DASH is that users can bypass expensive money wiring services such as Western Union. It sends money without wire services because it disperses funds straight to digital wallets.
DASH; which provides a high level of security and anonymity, is potentially an excellent medium for remittances. If it worked as advertised, DASH’s P2P system would enable people to send money to individuals in other countries without governments knowing.
This might help people avoid currency controls, but it invites a conflict with tax authorities. A smart move would be to add a taxation mechanism to DASH so governments would profit from it. Governments that saw DASH as a source of revenue would encourage its use.
Dash (DASH) for Consumers
Residents of developing nations would use PAYG payment solutions to purchase a wide variety of consumer goods with DASH. People in Africa are using PAYG to buy things like TV sets, refrigerators, sewing machines, and solar electric systems.
A PAYG is a smartphone app that allows people to make purchases on the installment plan. The PAYG automatically collects installment payments in digital currency.
Using DASH would encourage companies to sell to residents of developing nations because it would limit exposure to volatile currencies. Consumers would make payments in DASH it can convert which into stable fiat currencies such as dollars or Euros.
Other uses of DASH would be to pay gig economy workers in developing nations and lending. Lack of banking services is a major problem in developing countries. Cryptocurrencies like DASH might provide a substitute for banks.
Problems with Dash (DASH)
There are some drawbacks to DASH. It is not ERC20, which means the Ethereum Virtual Machine cannot covert DASH into Ethereum (ETH). Therefore, DASH will not work with Ethereum blockchain platforms.
Other potential DASH dilemmas include difficulty converting into fiat currency or other cryptocurrencies. DASH is not convertible with Bancor’s liquidity network. That means it’s hard to convert.
A greater dilemma is the blockchain scalability problem which limits Bitcoin-based cryptocurrencies to a transaction speed of under 10 payments a section. DASH would need a potential speed of several transactions a second to function as a mass-market payment solution.
The DASH Core Group is working on the problem with Arizona State University’s (ASU) Blockchain Research Lab, a press release indicates. Unfortunately, there is no evidence a solution to the problem is available.
The DASH network can be theoretically scaled up to 10 million block sizes and blocks of up to 10 billion might be possible for DASH, a research paper by ASU Blockchain Research Lab Director Dragan Boscovic claims. Bosovic is a professor at the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering.
DASH is an interesting altcoin with some tremendous potential. Speculators looking for a cryptocurrency capable of fast growth should look at DASH.
DASH has the potential of reaching a mass market and becoming a widely used medium of exchange. Therefore, DASH is theoretically capable of significant growth in Coin Price and Market Capitalization with the proper conditions.
Yes, DASH is a good speculative cryptocurrency. Speculators should definitely investigate DASH. Everybody else should avoid DASH for now.
