Dash
Dash presents itself as the solution to all the problems Bitcoin is currently experiencing. The philosophy and design of the currency are to reduce energy consumption during mining, protect the network against attacks and guarantee anonymity and integrity of payment transactions. According to Dash's own understanding, it is the innovative redesign of the classic Bitcoin blockchain.
Dash started his existence in early 2014 as Fork by Litecoin under the name XCoin, but was soon renamed Darkcoin. After another rebranding, the currency has had its current name since 2015, with Dash being a suitcase word for "Digital Cash". Although Dash's code and many of its developers originate from the Litecoin environment, the currency is conceptually and technically an improvement on the great role model Bitcoin. Without developing the blockchain concept from scratch, such as IOTA or Cardano, the developers at Dash are trying to circumvent a number of problems that plague Bitcoin in particular by making small improvements in the design and implementation of the system.
How does Dash work?
Like Bitcoin, Dash relies on the classic proof of work consensus mechanism to validate transactions (mining). However, proof of work procedures are notoriously resource-hungry and favour energy-intensive systems such as dedicated hardware for mining. Dash reduces this problem by using the hash algorithm X11. The number 11 is in the name here for a good reason: The procedure is a concatenation of 11 different hash algorithms, whose execution one after the other is more energy-efficient than that of SHA-256 with the Bitcoin. All methods were originally participants in the competition for the new hash standard SHA-3 (developed by Guido Bertoni, Joan Daemen, Michaël Peeters and Gilles Van Assche under the name "Keccak").
The complete list of algorithms is: BLAKE, BMW (Blue Midnight Wish), Grøstl, JH, Keccak/SHA-3, Skein, Luffa, CubeHash, SHAvite, SIMD and ECHO.
So while even the consecutive execution of 11 modern hash algorithms is more energy- and time-saving than the simple execution of SHA-256, the construction of X11 brings a further effect with it. It is possible to construct dedicated hardware for individual algorithms that perform a fixed set of operations over and over again. This means systems that are specifically tailored to the algorithm in question - at Bitcoin, for example, to guessing SHA-256 hash sums. An algorithm such as X11 does not allow such a procedure, because the construction of hardware that covers 11 fundamentally different hash algorithms can hardly or at best only be accomplished with considerable effort. The Dash developers want to prevent the threatening monopolization of Dash assets, since participants with large financial resources cannot reinvest them in dedicated hardware in order to mine larger quantities of Dash.