Then you just don't understand accounting convention. Unfortunately investors do and this matters to them because there is no other "convention" to measure value by. Even speculative value ends up on the books eventually either by mark to market conventions or, in the case of POW blockchains, through difficulty adjustments.

If you buy a tractor for $60,000, it goes onto your balance sheet at that value as a capital asset and then gets depreciated from there.

You're basically dismissing the value of "mining difficulty" on some nebulous philosophical basis it doesn't add "intrinsic value" to the coin. That's irrelevant because it adds a material value to the scarcity and therefore adds to the book value once it's mined. So you'd need to come up with some pretty categorical reason why a coin like Dash - where only 40% of the exchange revenues from mining sales go towards difficulty adjustments upwards while 100% of our competitor revenues do - should be more valuable and expensive.

You don't have one and that's what I'm saying the problem is (as far as new investors are concerned). All of Dash's "feature advantages" are worth nothing if half of the primary supply investment capital goes towards populating masternode balance sheets instead of backing the marketcap with higher marginal mining costs. We inherit the bitcoin protocol which is a store-of-value protocol. If we just want to create a feature-rich blockchain then you're better off with some modern token system like Tezos or something that's at least dedicated for that purpose.

If you feel you have some "modern concept" of value that somehow defies the appraisals I made above, be my guest.

Hand waving philosophical vagaries, bald assertions and speaking in generalities has never and will never impress any potential investors. They understand basic things like how hashrate affects scarcity, how masternode rewards far outweigh operating costs (so "overpaid") and long term ranking performance as an arbitrator on the governance priorities we make.

This coin has some core properties that are very good and it's survived nearly 7 years so far with reasonable visibility. That is about to end because the market is turning around and it isn't taking us with it this time so some soul searching is in order. The kind of arguments you've offered up so far in response to my criticisms that the reward ratio is set wrong, are 2014 type stuff. We can't get away with that anymore - we need things nailed down and a granular understanding of the economics of the coin which REFLECTS what we see in the market, not that contradicts it.

There needs to be monetary tightening. If you really need a "for dummies" rule of thumb, a good indicator of "loose ship" economics is bloated parasitical profits being made by any type of stakeholder, be it miners, masternodes, contractors, traders, whatever. In that respect the masternode reward sticks out like a sore thumb. It's a no-brainer.

Put it this way, if you were earning $500 per week from masternode rewards, would you rather that came in the form of 2 Dash or 0.2 Dash ? Reflect on that for a moment because in the latter case your collateral would be worth 10 times more than in the former.

The DAO also needs some reform. The contracts on there are paltry. They are a pale shadow of the activity a few years back when there was a lot more contention in the community but a lot more action and broader participation as well. That all got shut down and needs to be invigorated but part of that process is acknowledging that this is not a "club", it's an industry and that requires critical self appraisals, not the kind of "everything's alright and everything will be alright" that seems to have characterised your responses so far.

All in all what I'm saying is that there is no way forward other than to make ourselves highly competitive again in the store of value asset market. That will mean some bullet biting decisions IMHO.

DASH PUMP IT UP!!! 

It doesn't ignore that point at all. What exactly would be the point of "forking" it ? To demonstrate that governance doesn't work ?

Governance is working fine, it's just sending the price in the wrong direction that's all, and the reasons are adequately explained above.

If you're on a freeway and discover you're accidentally going south when you meant to go North, you don't need to shrug your shoulders and continue clueless into the distance hoping you'll find a future as good as the one you planned. You look for the nearest exit, get across the opposite carriageway and continue back on track. The kinds of protocol changes we made a couple of years back address fundamental market trends that can take a couple of years to manifest unambiguously. We are now at "freeway" that point.

The difference is that none of those have 3000-4000 node holders leaching the investment in new supply straight into their own pockets instead of allowing it to pass into the chain in the form of raising the marginal cost of a block.

Remember:

Marginal coin price = marginal cost of block  block reward.

So you can't BOTH be a top 40 capital gain coin AND pay 4000 masternodes rewards that are 98% in excess of their operating costs. Pick one.

This analogy doesn't describe blockchain mining. You're thinking of earth mining which isn't the same in economic terms and gold mining can't be used as an accurate archetype. In earth mining, the cost of production does not depend on the number of miners. The cost of extraction is fixed and depends on things like how deep in the ground the target mineral is, how sparse or dense it manifests etc.

Blockchain "mining" is different. It's a decentralised market pure and simple and therefore DOES depend on the number of market participants (which are unfortunately referred to a "miners"). So the price in that (primary) market responds to demand for the next block. Much of that demand originates in secondary markets (exchanges) and finds its way into the primary market via the brokering function of the miner. So the capital flow looks like this:

Exchange Buyer --> $1000 --> Miner --> $1000 --> Increase in difficulty (and therefore primary price)

But for masternodes, the capital that enters the exchange never reaches the blockchain and is not available for raising the price. Instead it goes onto the masternode's balance sheet and is lost to the Dash ecosystem completely:

Exchange Buyer --> $1000 --> Masternode --> $1000 --> Growth in MN balance sheet. (No difficulty increase and therefore no primary price increase)

Even if the masternode does not sell, as you propose, there is still a deficit in primary demand caused by the masternode receiving the coin without having to compete/bid for it (at nodecount equilibrium).

Disagree.  A common mistake in this space is to compare coins like Dash and Bitcoin with LUNA, Terra, FTT, BNB, SOLana and other such scams.  Those coins have massive premines/pre-sales to VC, can be printed at will without consensus and are used to collateralise risky bets that invariably come under pressure in bear markets, when they do they go to zero.  Dash and Bitcoin are different, they have a finite supply, fixed emission schedule, are not used to collaterlise risky bets by the coin's own creators.  These will coins will hold their value and return to high valuations when the stampede out of the market ends.

This is a great opportunity for Dash as the market is doing what it must do which is purge itself of the rubbish tokens thus allowing the OG coins to flourish once again.

You obviously don't know the history of DASH.  If you did you'd know that when it started out and was called Darkcoin that there was a 500,000 coin premine disguised as a glitch but was a scammy way of premining without calling it a premine.

DASH is a rubbish coin. 

Is Dash still alive? Lot of payment processors like Coinbase commerce.coinbase.com or Poof poof.io, Paypal, Square, etc don't accept Dash anymore for payments.

It's had a pretty big fall from grace since 2017 although it's still on a few exchanges.