A bit of history.
The project was created in January 2014 by a team of developers led by Evan Duffield. Before launching the platform, the American programmer studied the algorithms of other coins for several years and concluded that digital currency should preserve the anonymity of users.
The BTC wallet system had tools to ensure the confidentiality of transactions - mixers. But the community did not support Duffield's initiative to implement a built-in protocol to increase anonymity. That's what prompted the Americans to start a separate project.
Dash cryptocurrency previously had another name - XCoin. In February 2014, the coin was given a more catchy name DarkCoin, but this variant was consonant with the concept of "shadow circulation" of finance. Eventually, the developers settled on Dash (from the English digital cash - digital money).
Peculiarities of the cryptocurrency
Dash coin (DASH) is used in a fully decentralized system: every community member can influence the decisions about the project's development. The network uses a complex mechanism for mining new coins - the X11 protocol, which consists of 11 consecutive functions.
What is Dash in simple words?
An overview of the Dash cryptocurrency allows us to highlight the following characteristics: it is a decentralized, fast, and anonymous alternative to BTC. The system's source code has similar principles to Bitcoin, including the Proof-of-Work model, which allows the mining of new tokens.
But unlike BTC, this coin can be mined on video cards and processors. In this case, we mean "amateur" mining because you need to use special equipment for faster calculations.
At the same time, such cryptocurrency is now valued, and many companies gladly accept Dash as payment.
Although ordinary users can mine new blocks, special servers, called controller nodes, are involved in the transaction chain.
These nodes act as mixers, breaking up the transfer into multiple pieces and mixing up that money. Once the controller nodes process the transaction, it becomes impossible to match the sender and the recipient.
In theory, this guarantees almost complete anonymity. However, there are warnings from experts that node owners could take possession of the confidential information of transaction participants, although there has yet to be a direct confirmation of such cases as of 2022.
