Increasingly, members of the Bitcoin Cash community see Dash as its major competitor.
As highlighted by a recent post on the /r/BTC subreddit, Bitcoin Cash’s community increasingly sees other payments-focused coins, mainly Dash and Litecoin, as competition, rather than traditional rival Bitcoin, which is increasingly moving away from focus as digital cash to a settlement layer for off-chain payment technologies. The original poster outlined some of the reasons why Dash should be seen as the main competitor to Bitcoin Cash:
“Despite Litecoin’s higher market cap, I think Dash is more of a threat than Litecoin. Dash has a big, passionate… and slightly crazy (no offence intended Dash guys… you are though) community. Dash has easy to use privacy features built into some of their wallet software. Dash has a fair bit of merchant acceptance. Dash has an Instant Send feature that allows for relatively secure zero-conf payments. The Dash culture is uber focused on ease of use. We can do better on all fronts, however: we really have to do better.”
The majority of comments seem to voice general agreement with the original post, interspersed with occasional hostile disagreement. Some extended the original premise to compare Dash and Bitcoin Cash as closer to allies than competitors:
Many competitive similarities between the two projects
Both Dash and Bitcoin Cash are likely the cryptocurrency projects that focus the most clearly on the original vision of Bitcoin to provide a peer-to-peer electronic cash system for the whole world to use. Both operate in a decentralized manner, leveraging proof-of-work mining (mainly through specialized ASIC miners) to process transactions and distribute coins. The main reason for Bitcoin Cash’s split from Bitcoin was disagreements over on-chain scaling, an approach that Dash has also embraced to grow the network. Both prioritize merchant adoption and instantly-accepted point-of-sale transactions due to a high probability of acceptance before receiving on-blockchain confirmations.
The two projects provide essentially the same base project, however Dash differs in several important ways as far as extra features and infrastructure. Instead of distributing coins purely to miners, Dash reserves 10% to a decentralized treasury to pay for development and other projects, while the remaining block reward is split evenly between miners and masternodes, specialized nodes that run special features and vote on treasury funds allocation. Dash also includes a feature for instant transaction locking, making merchant payments more reliable, as well as an optional privacy feature to obscure the origin of transactions.
Dash’s adoption head start
With both Bitcoin Cash and Dash having a similar focus on merchant adoption, Dash has nonetheless had a noticeable head start due to its existence and drive before Bitcoin Cash came into existence:
Dash has made significant inroads into merchant adoption, with over 3,700 listed on DiscoverDash alone. Over 2,000 of these are located in Venezuela, most (if not all) of which accept Dash exclusively rather than as one of many cryptocurrencies. The first stages of the Evolution update are planned for release over the next several months, which should provide a much easier user experience than before, with usernames, friending, contact lists, etc.
