By Jason Hamlin, GoldStockBull.com

Bitcoin has climbed to a new record high in 2017 above $1,250. Notably, the price of bitcoin is now higher than the price of one ounce of gold. But the cryptocurrency Dash is the stealing the spotlight. While bitcoin is up 200% year to date in 2017, the price of dash is up 2,500% from less than $4 to over $100!

Dash stands for digital cash and was rebranded from Darkcoin back in March of 2015. It is a digital cryptographic currency much like bitcoin, but it has some key advantages that have led to people dubbing it “Bitcoin 2.0.” While bitcoin takes at least 10 minutes to confirm a transaction and can take hours if the fee isn’t high enough, dash features InstantSend payments that confirm is less than a second.

Dash also features much greater privacy than bitcoin. PrivateSend ensures that your activity history and balances are private. Perhaps the move innovative part of the dash network is their use of masternodes. This makes dash a unique fully-incentivized peer-to-peer network. Miners are rewarded for securing the blockchain and masternodes are rewarded for validating, storing and serving the blockchain to users. Masternodes represent a new layer of network servers that work in highly secure clusters called quorums to provide a variety of decentralized services, like instant transactions, privacy and governance, while eliminating the threat of low-cost network attacks.

Dash is the fastest growing cryptocurrency at the moment and has quickly risen to the #3 spot by market capitalization. At $729 million, it has surpassed Ripple, Monero and Litecoin. While it is a distant third place behind Ethereum, the market cap is now nearly 3X Monero and Ripple. Dash has also become the most active altcoin community on BitcoinTalk reaching more than 6300 pages, 127k replies, 7.7M reads.

Another cool features of dash is that is offers the first self governing, self funding protocol of its kind. In Dash, everyone has a voice and the ability to propose projects directly to the network. Anything you can do – from marketing to development – that helps Dash grow and improve can be funded. This means Dash funds its own growth and adoption, consensus is guaranteed, and everyone is accountable to the network. Just submit a treasury proposal and present your idea to the network for funding and make your case, or if you operate a Masternode, you can vote. This is known as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

In order to run a masternode, a user must put up 1000 DASH as something akin to collateral, though unlike traditional collateral, the Dash never leaves the user’s possession. It can be moved or spent at any time by the user – doing so simply removes the masternode from service and makes it ineligible to receive rewards. In return for providing these services, one Masternode is selected by the network to receive a part of the reward of each mined block. 45% of the block reward is dedicated to this Masternode which at its current rate works out to be 1.94 dash ($200 at current rates).

Think of a masternode as a savings account with a minimum deposit of 1,000 DASH. A traditional savings account pays interest, and a masternode pays rewards which are very much like interest. In the case of a masternode, the reward (or interest) comes from performing services for the network. Not from lending. The big difference between a traditional savings account and a masternode is that your initial deposit never leaves your possession.

Dash Criticisms

1.9 million coins were mined in 48 hours, or approximately 27% of the current supply (as of March 2017) of approximately 7.1 million, generating controversy regarding the initial distribution of coins. According to core developer Evan Duffield, the so-called “instamine” was the result of an error in the code “which incorrectly converted the difficulty, then tried using a corrupt value to calculate the subsidy, causing the instamine.”

Some have speculated that this “instamine” was intentional and designed to enrich the coin’s creator, Evan Duffield. Others have pointed out that Duffield had the opportunity to quit the project and cash out any of his “instamined” coins during the major price bubble of May 2014, yet he still works full time as a Dash developer, as of March 2017.

Summary

Many believe that as bitcoin grapples with infighting over how to reduce confirmation times and fees, another digital currency will step in to fill the void. Dash may very well be that currency or bitcoin 2.0. There is no doubt that it offers competitive advantages to bitcoin and that people are flocking to dash in a way they haven’t to any other alt coins. Those that bought dash just a few months ago have seen their investment increase by 25X. If you invested $40,000 into dash at the beginning of 2017, you would be sitting on $1 million right now!

While our focus at Gold Stock Bull is on precious metals, we were early adopters of bitcoin and first recommended the cryptocurrency to subscribers back in 2013 when it was around $100. It is currently trading for $1,250. We alerted subscribers to the potential of dash recently and the price has more than doubled from our entry point in a very short time period. We continue to monitor and track upcoming digital currencies, while providing an update in our monthly newsletter.

Gold investors are skeptical of cryptocurrencies that are not physical objects that can be held in your hand. There are countless articles comparing bitcoin to gold, now that the bitcoin price has eclipsed the gold price. Analysts and commentators fight about which is better and why, but I believe they are complimentary currencies. Investors stand to benefit from owning both, as they serve different purposes. Yet, they do have some things in common, such as the fact that their supply is stricly limited and it takes a good deal of energy to mine both. They are outside of the traditional banking system and not controlled by central bankers.

We created a “Guide to Investment in Bitcoin” for our subscribers and send regular updates on not only precious metals, energy, cannabis and emerging technology stocks, but also the cryptocurrency space and our view on the best investments. Click here to sign up!

By Jason Hamlin, GoldStockBull.com