The biggest attraction to Monero is for specific confidential financial transactions within large companies and investor groups.Monero has consistently put privacy and security over usability and marketing. Most early users were relatively tech savvy as the official wallet required the use of the command line. Although GUI development began in 2014 it ceased completely for a long time following the August 2014 spam attack with cryptographic research focusing on privacy and security being given the highest priority. Monero today is completely different than it was in 2014 with the inclusion of LMDB, RingCT completion, funded Kovri development underway and much more. Although the GUI was released in December 2016 and has improved usability, the Monero community is much more excited about the mandatory enforcement of RingCT (was activated in January 2017) and multisig.

DASH has also been actively developed over the past few years but privacy and security (at least in terms of block chain immutability) has gradually been given less importance.Dash is a Bitcoin mixer built on top of a masternode Ponzi scheme.55% of Dash's founder/developer tax that comes out of each block reward.10% of the block reward goes directly to the Dash general treasury. This equals $5,000 per day. Another 45% goes to large holders of Dash called masternodes who provide a mixing service representing about 2% of the total transactions on the network.

This level of compensation to masternodes is ludicrous, with a total of $25,000 per day going to a handful of server operators. The truth of it is that this is a scheme to further remunerate the founder of Dash, Evan Duffield, since it is thought that the majority of these masternodes are controlled by him and others close to him. Here's why:Dash tokens are actually a remnant of a currency called XCoin. The initial coin offering for XCoin was not widely advertised and the developer Evan Duffield lied about the release date and time. Evan released the coin without warning and a supposed "bug" then allowed 1.5 million XCoins to be mined in the first 8 hours. An analysis of the early XCoin miners showed that over 80% were through a VPS and likely operated by the same individual. Only later was the masternode idea added on to XCoin which Evan rebranded as DarkCoin and then later called "Dash", yet the Dash network then accepted those same XCoin tokens that had previously been instamined. This means that almost 20% of the current Dash supply was instamined by a very few number of individuals, mining a coin which had no apparent innovation or value added to the Bitcoin proposition.