Leapfrogging Bitcoin, Dash Adopts 2MB Block Sizes

Dash, the cryptocurrency formerly known as DarkCoin, has marked its second birthday on Monday with a vote among its stakeholders to increase the blocksize from 1 MB to 2 MB. Despite coming far ahead of demand for the move, the measure passed in less than 24 hours by an overwhelming majority with 99 percent of the vote.

Completely decentralized, Dash proponents boast it is superior to Bitcoin in several ways: (1) it has instant confirmations vs. 10 minutes or more for bitcoin, (2) the mining system provides rewards for development of the network vs. relying on donated time, like bitcoin does, and (3) the governance of Dash is hard-coded into its network, so all stakeholders who run a node of 1,000 Dash or more get an instant vote on the future of the network.

Evan Duffield, an American programmer based in Phoenix, is the founder of the cryptocurrency. The developers say that while they believe bitcoin will always hold a great utility for store of value and sending of larger transactions (into the millions of dollars), Dash is immediately a better solution for smaller transactions and microtransactions (the existence of which has slowed down and “bloated” the bitcoin Blockchain , leading to its current scaling issues).

Over the last seven days, the price of Dash has gone up by about 45% to $4.46, solidifying its position as the fifth biggest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, following Ethereum's Ether.