Hello, and welcome back to your final lesson
of Dash School, I'm your teacher,
Amanda B. Johnson
And let us embark on our final coursework,
which as I alluded to in the last lesson
is about where Dash is going next.
A software release called Evolution.
Now that you understand how a blockchain works,
Yes, a blockchain is righteous and it is an exellent
way to keep records, and an excellent way to opperate
a value transfer system where no particular person is in charge.
But, as mentioned in the last lesson,
most people don't like the look of
alpha-numeric addresses and find them to be
no good.
Secondly, the management of one's wallet password and backups,
for a lot of people, is easy to get wrong, is easy to forget,
is easy to misplace. And with the current state of Digital Currency,
that means a total loss of funds.
And finally, making payments is still hard.
It's hard to keep track of your friend's addresses
or to know which address belongs to which friend
or to even know, "Hey buddy, are you still using that
address you gave me 6 months ago, or do I need to
send to a different one now?"
Evolution then, is Dash specific software, set for release
in late 2017.
And it has several primary functionalities that
will make it, what I have called, a Digital Currency
that even one's mother would like to use.
First, is the implementation of user names.
As in, "Why yes friend, you can pay me some Dash to
hit me back up for paying for dinner, just send to
address X4yr7....scratch that ..........
Just send to user name
AmandaBJohnson" for example
And the payment you send me will land in an address.
And if you want to send me another payment in the future,
which I hope you do, it will land in a different address.
And the payment you send me after that, will again, land in it's
own and separate address.
And for ease of my own personal accounting,
what will my wallet show me once I've received your payment?
It will show it as coming from YOUR user name.
So I can check my wallet and be like "Oh, hey good friend,
I see your payment has just come in. Thanks for reimbursing me,
can't wait to go to dinner with you again"
In the "under the hood" part of the wallet, yes, the network
will still be running via cryptography, but Dash will be the
first digital currency network in which the user doesn't have
to look at that crap anymore.
Check out this screenshot of the evolution wallet here (see screen)
Where you see human readable named accounts in place of
alpha numeric addresses.
The second improvement that Dash Evolution has in store
has to do with passwords and backups.
Now I know I haven't talked about these yet.
So let me put these in the right place in your mind.
Remember how we learned before that your public address
is the one where you receive payments, also the one you send
payments out from? Basically it's the one you can share with
anybody in order to have them send you money?
And remember how the private key is the even
longer alpha-numeric address that your wallet keeps
hidden away from you but uses to make little signatures
to tell the network when you want to spend from your
address?
So this is where the backups and the passwords come to play.
See if just anyone could say pick up your mobile phone
and open up your Digital Currency Wallet,
they could view your private key, and in so doing,
could copy it themselves, put it into their own wallet
and take all your money.
So most people with Digital Currency Wallets,
password protect them,
to protect the private key.
What's more, if you were to say, lose that cell phone,
that has your wallet on it or accidentally flush it down
the toilet, or run over it with your car,
you would lose that private key and hence the funds
in the address connected with it, if you hadn't also
made a backup of that private key.
meaning you literally copy and pasted it and saved it in a
hard drive in a safe, or even wrote it down on a piece of paper and
stored it at your cousin's house in the basement -
only if you implicitly trust your cousin of course.
As you can see, passwords and backups are paramount in
the use of digital currency. But how many people in this world
do you think either forget passwords or forget to do things
like back-up data?
A LOT - A lot - A lot of them.
So Dash Evolution will offer the option,
only for those customers who want it,
the ability to reset forgotten passwords,
and the ability to automate the making of backups.
for example by sending to an email address that you
choose to provide.
It's a truism that there is always a trade-off between security
and convenience. The more of one you have,
the less of the other you have, and vice versa.
At Dash, we realize that the world has customers across this
entire spectrum. Some people want maximum this (security)
Some people want maximum this (convenience)
and everyone else follows somewhere in between.
The release of Evolution means that Dash will have products to
suit people regardless of where they fall on the spectrum.
And that third problem I mentioned that Evolution
aims to solve. Digital currency payments are hard to make.
Evolution aims to solve this by giving people what they're
already used to. Firstly, account types.
As you see here, we can have a spending account,
a savings account, Hell, even accounts
with various permission types.
Like only I can access my spendings, but both my
spouse and I can access our savings.
Oh, and how about recurring payments?
You know, merchants and vendors who want
you to pay them the same amount every month
on the same day?
Monthly billing is, I dare say, a foundation to the
modern economy. And digital currency has to be
able to do that.
How about a social contact list?
If I'm going to do business with you, more than once,
I'm going to need a way to record which payment
address I should send to.
So when I put your user name into my social list,
that whole fancy ability for user names to act
as proxies for as many addresses as you ever want,
means that I never have to ask you for your new and
current address again.
And lets get crazy;
How about some dispute resolution of payments?
I'll be honest, I don't even know how that one is going to work
but here is a screenshot of it in action right here.
And the resolution is here.
Now here's a thought you may be having;
Amanda, all those things look an awful lot like
what modern banks do.
And you're right.
These are what modern banks do.
And that's because people want these services.
Otherwise, banks wouldn't exist.
So the real problem then, that Evolution aims to solve,
is how can we have all (or nearly all) the services offered
by a bank, without letting any other humans hold our
money for us?
Because that's been working out so well.
Now you may be thinking to yourself,
"Gee golly, Amanda, I kinda want to Invest in Dash"
The easiest way to do this is to simply buy some Dash.
And the best way to buy is kind of always changing
as markets change.
So I'd recommend just heading on over to reddit.com/r/DashPay
and asking, "Hey, what's the best place to buy Dash these days?"
The second best way to invest in DAsh, is to run a Masternode.
And if you click the link to the video you see on your screen now,
you'll find a tutorial on how to do that.
And for the truly ambitious, with specialized skills perhaps,
you can also apply to work directly for the Dash Network.
And be paid in Dash. Click the link to the video that you
see on your screen now, for more about how that works.
And 4th, you could become a miner yourself.
As in, buy a mining machine and plug it in at home,
or at work, or wherever you choose to do that.
And more information about how to become a miner,
again, can be most easily by asking, in the Dash sub-reddit.
And my friend, that completes your coursework in
the blockchain and how Dash uses one.
If you still have more questions, and that would not
be surprising, one can always visit the website Dash.org
for links to wiki documentation, code basis, that sort of thing.
And/or for the more lay person friendly approach,
I make a weekly show entitled Dash Detailed which
can be found at youtube.com/DashOrg.
So, flip your tassel, throw your cap in the air,
You are now a graduate of Dash School and you
didn't even have to go into a bit of debt to do it.
Feel free to share this series with your crypto curious friends,
And have a good day.
The end.
