Now that you’re familiar with Dash’s wallet, and the way that it is produced, you may be wondering how you can acquire some. There are basically 3 ways to acquire Dash.
- Become a miner
- Become a Dash masternode operator
- Buy some Dash
How To Mine Dash
Mining Dash is not recommended if you’re doing so on your own. The reason being is that mining Dash becomes more and more difficult as time passes and more miners are added to the network. This decreases the reward per-miner, because the network adjusts to have a 2 minute and 30 second block reward time. Thus, if there are more miners, the network will adjust the difficulty based on a complicated formula to make sure that this target time is met.
Thus, it doesn’t really benefit one to become a miner unless you have very cheap electricity and spare money to spend on ever-upgraded hardware. A way to mitigate this effect is to join a miner pool, where you contribute a share of the hashpower to the total pool while the rewards are split amongst the miners. This is also not recommended if you are only using a CPU. If you buy hardware specifically for mining, like GPU cards or ASICs, you may be able to make a profit. But equipment costs and electricity will be big factors in determining if you can make a profit/ROI or not.
Another way to mine Dash, is to purchase cloud mining shares. However, cloud mining services are replete with ponzi-schemes and scams. its unfortunate, but it is difficult to find a cloud-mining service that is not illegitimate. Since mining itself is barely profitable, you should be wary of services offering large, quick ROIs. Also see the bitcoin talk thread that lists ponzi-schemes and possible frauds based on a number of criteria.
All in all, mining Dash is not something for those with little capital or technical expertise. You are likely to lose your money by not calculating all your costs properly, or by falling victim to a ponzi scheme. If you want to go the mining route, considerable research will be necessary in order to break-even on your investment, as well as a considerable amount of initial capital to purchase the correct machines, and cover other costs.
How to Become a Dash Masternode Operator
Luckily, becoming a masternode operator is much simipler than mining dash is. All you need is to purchase 1000 Dash ($ 8,135 as of 5/31/2016), download the latest version of the Dash client, and transfer the 1000 Dash to your wallet. Masternodes perform the mixing of Dash coins and serve as the backbone for the anonymity of the network. As such, becoming an operator of a masternode entitles you to 45% of the mined Dash when your node is selected to do a mixing. Unlike Bitcoin, which has a fixed number (25 as of 5/31/2016) of Bitcoins rewarded per block, Dash adjusts the amount of Dash awarded dynamically based on the difficulty as given by the formula: 2222222/(((Difficulty+2600)/9)^2.
This means that it is impossible to state definitively how much Dash will ever be created, or how much the block reward will be, since the difficulty, and as a result the reward, change over time as function of the number of miners. HOwever, it is estimated that there will only be around 18.9 million Dash ever created. This can be deduced roughly due to the fact that Dash’s reward decreases 7% per year. Eventually, it will get so small that miners will be paid from transaction fees, just like in Bitcoin. It is not known when this transition will occur. However, if you are a masternode operator, you can expect to make around $80 in passive income per month at the current difficulty rate.
How to Buy Dash Then?
Purchasing Dash is a simple matter. If you already own Bitcoin, you can transfer that to an exchange like Poloniex.com or any of the several other BTC/DASH exchanges , and you can use that to purchase Dash at the current price. Alternatively, you can buy Dash Directly with Cash (USD/DSH) using some of the following gateways:
- Poloniex
- BTC-e
- Exmo
- Livecoin
- BTER
These websites will allow you to purchase Dash directly with USD if you don’t have any Bitcoin, or just prefer to do so directly. Also, you could buy Dash in person using a meet up website to coordinate the sale. Recently, Dash became the second Cryptocurrency, after Bitcoin itself, to be accepted by ATM maker Lamassu. Lamassu has roughly 150 ATMs worldwide, so at any one of these locations you could theoretically buy Dash anonymously with cash, and you could either send it to your wallet, or get a receipt and scan the QR code to have it sent to your wallet. Hopefully you can use one of these ways to obtain Dash, and get started using the currency.
