Believe it or not both Dash and DashCoin exist and some great memes to go along with the explanation. Enjoy!
Lately, I have been mostly inactive on Steemit and there is one good reason behind that. I have been researching on mining cryptocurrencies. During the past 2 weeks, I have tried mining some 10 different cryptos (Ethereum, Zcash, Monero, Dash, ...). The learning curve has been exponential. I will be making a post soon enough on my mining experience so for now lets jump into the subject.
When I tried mining using MinerGate, I thought I was mining Dash but looking at the speed at which I was mining, I was totally confused. I am using an old AMD GPU for mining and the output should have been lower. While searching why I am getting a better Dash mining output from MinerGate as compared to other miners, I became aware that 2 coins with almost the same name exists! One is Dash and one is Dashcoin (which I am mining).
Dash (DASH)
Dash appeared in January 2014, with the original name of XCoin. 10 days later, the core dev team renamed it to Darkcoin.
More than a year later, it was finally named Dash.
Conspiracy says that they wanted to make more people move to Dash instead of DashCoin. Since then the confusion emerged and is still present to this day.
Basically Dash has the same symbol as its name (DASH). It is based upon the X11 algorithm, which consists of 11 hashing algorithm for its PoW. Current rate of Dash is $203 with a market cap of $1,482,361,223 at the time of writing. Another feature that even I don't understand what it means is Darksend which is a special scheme designed to be anonymous in continuous perpetuity. I need to make some more research to understand the underlying technology.
Remember the way the D is symbolized in the Dash logo to make the difference with its Dashcoin counterpart.
Dashcoin (DSH)
Dashcoin was also launched in 2014 but a bit later in July. It is an automatically mutating mirror fork of ByteCoin as stated on the blog page of MinerGate. What this means only God knows!
It is based on a technology called CrytoNote which runs the CryptoNight algorithm. Its stealth feature lies in the algorithm which uses ring signatures and one-time addresses.
Dashcoin allows you to be totally anonymous on the blockchain. An address which is used only once is very difficult to connect to someone in the real world.
Current rate of Dashcoin is $0.023 at the time of writing with a market cap of $399,853. Dashcoin is also not listed in any exchanges yet. I verified in my Bittrex wallet and there is non! You need to setup the wallets on your machine in order to make transfers. For normal users, it can be a bit tricky to set this up.
To conclude, we don't know which one is really better but for now Dash is doing well as compared to Dashcoin. Well they may both disappear in thin air the next minute.
This is why investing in cryptocurrencies is a high risk activity and you should consider all your pros and cons before investing as with all other types of investments. Do it and do it wisely.
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