Despite its youth, the DASH cryptocurrency has a history full of events. The project was launched on January 18, 2014 as XCoin. Considerable interest in this new currency arose from the start and this was caused because mining of XCoins was possible even with the graphic processors of videocards while mining of Litecoin and Bitcoin on CPU and GPU stopped being the profitable a long ago. Of course, cryptocurrencies that can be mined on CPU and GPU, both then and now exist but XCoin differed favorably from any of them.
The times of XCoin
The combination of 11 cryptographic algorithms (blake, bmw, groestl, jh, keccak, skein, luffa, cubehash, shavite, simd, echo) became the base algorithm of Xcoin. A short abbreviation of all of them was called X11. Only by breaking all 11 algorithms would give hackers a chance to seize power over the network. It made Xcoin a safer system in comparison with cryptocurrencies which use only one algorithm (like Bitcoin’s SHA-256 and Litecoin’s Scrypt algorithms).
Moreover Xcoin provided a high speed of transactions. The speed of confirmation of the transaction, 2.5 minutes (similar as with Litecoin), is favorably differed in comparison with Bitcoin with its 10 minutes or more to confirm the transaction.
Miners liked XCoin because of its high efficiency algorithm that saved electric power and mining equipment. In general, it had many technical innovations but still, Xcoin received lots of criticism. Especially because of an unnoticed bug in the code that allowed some early miners to get a huge reward. In only 48 hours they received 1.9 million coins, or about 30% of the whole volume today. And the next year the miner with one hundred thousand Xcoin became a Dollar millionaire.
Times of Darkcoin
Just 10 days after the start of the project on January 28, 2014, Xcoin was rebranded into Darkcoin. The whole negative information about the unevenness of distribution of Xcoin remained in the past, and thanks to the unique DarkSend function the Darkcoin cryptocurrency soon gained considerable popularity.
Bitcoin isn't anonymous at all, users must use additional services to ensure anonymity. While the function of Darkcoin that allowed it to mask transactions and IP addresses of participants of a network is built into the cryptocurrency. It became possible exactly because of the DarkSend algorithm. And it received a huge demand. For 2014 the price of Darkcoin made a considerable jump, and Darkcoin got in the TOP-5 of the most popular cryptocurrencies in the world.
The trades began at the level of approximately $0.6 at the end of February, 2014, and until the end of April the price didn't exceed $1. But then it jumped to $2, got a small kickback, and reached $14 by the end of May.
The Darkcoin price kept its positions at the levels over $10 for not long, and then began falling just as fast to the level of $1.6 in August. Until the end of 2014 the price of Darkcoin fluctuated from $1.6 to $3.2 with a tendency to decrease. 2015 too began at the level of $1.6.
DASH era
On March 25, 2015 developers changed the name Darkcoin to Dash (short for "digital cash"). The renaming was made to avoid associations with the underground markets and shadow business, and also to attract a wider audience. The developers plan succeeded and DASH began its ascension. Now many supporters of DASH see this cryptocurrency as a good alternative to Bitcoin.
The InstantX technology, which appeared in the fall of 2014, at the time of Darkcoin, makes payments instant (thus it charges an additional small fee). However, even by taking into account incomparably higher speed, commission charges when using DASH are tens times less, than when using Bitcoin.
The two-level system of its network is a unique innovation in the cryptocurrency world. It is possible to earn in the network not only by mining digital currency but also on the masternodes (one of the entrusted network nodes which accelerate transactions to about several seconds). Network capacity thus is very high and has no prejudice to decentralization and anonymity.
In 2016 Evan Duffield and developers are going to submit the Evolution project which will give DASH the functionality of a social network as well. More and more ATMs for Bitcoin on the initiative start accepting DASH. But the main power of DASH is in its community, where participants actively help to develop the network by investing in various projects.
In 2015 the DASH price hasn’t changed a lot. The main fluctuations were at about the price of $3. Below this level was a good level for purchase. On the chart for 2015 we can see two tops: one of $5.13 in April, 2015 when the market positively reacted to the news about renaming of the coin, and the second top of $3.99 in July.
In 2016 it is worth expecting further development of the Evolution project. Also the market may at last really grasp the advantages of the instant transactions of InstantX and anonymity of payments.
Perhaps China will pay more attention to DASH especially as in colloquial Chinese the word DASH (达世币) sounds like "a coin of the world" or "the world currency".
Moreover, it is still worth paying attention to a possible release of ASIC devices for X11 in 2016.
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