I'd like to thank you for your intelligent discussion and lack of trolliness. Those of us who believe in the future of Dash would be wise to remember that many of our most important features have come from Evan reading well-written critiques and making the necessary changes.

I'd like to ask a couple of questions of you:

a) Your point on obfuscated code is well-taken. I do understand the power of a "trigger" like the spork command and how the ability to perfectly time a hypothetical attack could be extremely useful. However, what prevents any cryptocurrency developer from putting secret/obfuscated spork-like code in their software? Couldn't Monero devs theoretically put a trigger command in their code and then hide it really well? Then when a dev sends a certain message the the network, the code would activate?

b) I know there have been crypto devs that have been caught with "secret" superblocks built into their currency. What is to prevent Monero from doing such a thing, only more cleverly? I realize that it would be harder to hide, but could it not be done?

c) I would like to point out that Dash underwent a security audit last year, and while much has changed since then, I feel certain that Kristov would have looked at the spork code. Though he is human and could have missed something, shouldn't that give a little extra reassurance versus a currency that has never been security-audited by a third party?

d) All software is a risk--many of us have been following the story of how Symantec managed to lose control of thousands of security certificates to employees who may have either been overzealous testers, or who may have been outright rogues. When we run any software, don't we accept those risks? Isn't an open source project like Dash significantly less risky than a closed source project like Windows?

e) Once the rapid development phase winds down, Evan will remove the spork and that risk will go away. If for some reason he was to refuse to remove the spork after rapid development, the project could be forked away from his control.

Frankly, I feel like a psychic. The instamine issue is just too unimportant for anyone to give a shit about. I had a feeling that the next "point of criticism" was going to be the spork code. Let's look at the history of criticism against Dash (I won't say trolling, because your posts very distinctly rise above that level):

1) Criticism: Darksend is based on CoinJoin, which has been shown to be weak.
*Corrective Action: Darksend has been improved drastically over the last year, with issues such as "dead change" resolved to everybody's satisfaction. Darksend has been security audited by Kristov Atlas and passed.

2) Criticism: Dash's masternodes are centralized.
*Corrective Action: The number of masternodes has increased from 600 to 3300; even a wealthy man like Otoh can't afford anything close to a majority of them.

3) Criticism: Evan runs a reference node to equalize masternode payment across the network. This is centralization.
*Corrective Action: The reference node was removed in v12. This really sent the trolls into a tailspin.

4) Criticism: Dash is instamined.
*Corrective Action: Evan has been very open and honest about those first few days, and the situation has been thoroughly explained. Honestly, most people don't really give a shit. All corporations endow their creators with equity, so if Evan got a few extra coins in the beginning, so much the better. The more Dash he holds, the greater his incentive to make his Dash move valuable by furthering development.

5) Criticism: The spork creates centralization risk.
*Corrective Action: A clear explanation of the what the spork does and does not do; an intelligent discussion about the risks inherent in any software, and how open-sourcing and security-auditing helps mitigate those risks.

The great thing is that every time critics bring up a problem, it gets fixed. Our critics in many ways are our greatest strength.

My wife really hates a particular store here in town. I kind of do too, although not quite as vehemently as she does. Let's say that she sees that store is doing something wrong, and so she complains about it. That's the worst possible thing she can do, if she wants this store to "suffer" in the long run. Why? Because by pointing out an organization's weaknesses, you give it a chance to improve itself.

For any true trolls out there who really want to see Dash fail, you should know that your constant discussion of Dash's weaknesses ultimately only strengthens the project.

Nice post (all of it). The highlighted part above has got me thinking... I agree that getting a majority of MNs is now beyond reach of almost every individual bad actor. However, I think it is still trivially within the reach of many medium to large-sized govcorp entities, many of which are starting to acknowledge that crypto exists and are predictably trying to assert control over it in various ways.

If this is true, is there anything that can be done structurally to mitigate the possibility or the perception of the possibility of hegemonic MN control? I realize that growth over time can take care of the issue, but it seems to be a vulnerability now.

This is very true and I replied to somebody the other day about this possibility. Frankly, I'm not sure there is anything that can presently be done (with any crypto or indeed any organization) that could stop a dedicated state actor from doing significant damage. The nearly unlimited resources of a major state actor would be probably be impossible to withstand. However, this transfers to really any organization that the government opposes. Subpoena power, arrest powers, civil forfeiture powers, etc. can all be used to coerce, damage, or destroy nearly any individual or organization.

Even the largest banks in the world can't stand up to the might of the U.S. government. The very large and powerful Swiss bank UBS recently buckled under the weight of threats from the U.S. government, although intervention from Hilary Clinton prevented it from turning into outright capitulation. (At issue was the fact that UBS' wealth management division was withholding information about account holders, despite subpoenas from the IRS. The U.S. was threatening to freeze all the bank's U.S. assets and begin arresting executives who traveled to the U.S. The bank found its position untenable and reached out to Hilary Clinton, then-Secretary of State, and brokered a deal.)

I think that if we are talking about unlimited resources then the buying "attack" is a "vulnerability" that all coins share.  If you buy for example 80% of any cryptocurrency in existence whether Bitcoin based or Cryptonote based then you basically own it at that point. It ceases to play a role as a distributed currency and you make every single holder rich in the process, it does not seem like a real attack vector in my opinion, specially in crypto currency where all of the people you bought coins from and made rich in the process of "subverting" the coin can just go ahead and fork a new coin with a ton of your resources to work with.

Good point on being able to fork the project and relaunch--with lots of wealthy former holders--in the event an outside party ends up "owning" the chain.

Yes I know about Proof of Service, but in the (half-baked) model I describe, the sub-MN loose-change participants would be providing a portion of a MN and thus would be providing a portion of an MN service. Collectively, they would be providing new (and distributed) MNs, which would be the main point of the model.

I thought at first the model might be weak with respect to voting rights, but that could be resolved with scaling - a normal MN could get 1000 voting units (say) and a sub-MN participant could get an appropriate sub-MN number of voting units.

One reason this is on my mind is that my MN income coins seem so passive (like BTC or gold in a vault) until I can accumulate enough to buy another MN or use one of the existing bundling services (where I've always sensed that the granularity should be fairly large, say 300 coins and up, rather than a dozen or so coins from a month of MN income). My analogy is to the old banking model - letting the bank use my money if it pays me something in exchange (not of course the present banking model of ZIRP and NIRP) - the network might use people's sub-MN amounts to build new MNs with multiple anonymous partial (opt-in) owners. Hmmn - fatal flaw - if the real MNs were dominated by some govcorp entity, then the sub-MN amounts might be dominated by the same entity? I'm not sure if the distribution effect of "little guys" would be safe enough.

In any case, such models might or might not be feasible/worthwhile to code.

Good point. Yikes - it would be easy enough to levy a fee but some centralized entity would have to do the actual work. Mutter, mumble. I'll think of some way out (maybe).     

Give it a few weeks, Movember is apon us.