Welcome!

TLDR: Our bots are still going strong, tons of new users and channels started to use our Telegram Bot recently. The MyDashWallet website also is going well and we all eagerly await Dash Platform. This proposal is for adding Twitch.tv and YouTube support to our MyDashWalletBot, more Statistics and Graphs, and integrating Dash into the first Game. We are asking for 25 Dash/month for the coming 5 months to partially support our bot developer and game developer integrating more features into the Bot and Game project we are also working on.

• Twitch integration (plus streamlabs)
• YouTube comment support
• Twitter fixes, usability
• Rain update
• Ongoing Bot improvements & Support
• https://mydashwallet.org/stats with more data and graphs, use existing data: show number of new users per day, tips per day, rains per day, messages per day, also streamers supporting Dash ala https://1upcoin.com/users
• FreeToPlay Game Towers Dash Integration to do in app purchases

Overview
Hey Dash Community, after a year away from updates to MyDashWallet and the bots (last proposal was Feb 2019, we still do fixes, support and maintenance, currently almost daily, but there were also times late 2019 when almost nothing had to be done for a month or so). MyDashWallet is a very successful project that was funded four times already by the Dash DAO with a high approval rate (93-96%). We just pushed a huge update with many smaller fixes and improvements against spam, rain, active users list, command help, stability, mostly for telegram, which is the most used platform right now, but all these fixes also help the Discord, Twitter, Reddit bots. There is over 50 Telegram communities actively using the bot right now ;)


Stats
Here are our current stats, almost everything is 2-10x up from last year when we were up 100x from a year before:

• Transactions: 179063 (from 56k early 2019)
• Dash Send: 404673.1 DASH (from 152k early 2019)
• PrivateSend Transactions: 15172 (from below 6k early 2019)
• Dash Mixed: 165212.7 DASH (from 63k early 2019)
• InstantSend Transactions: 7679 (from 3.8k early 2019)
• Tip Accounts: 7039 (from 2.8k early 2019)
• Tips: 101327 (from 48k early 2019)
• CoinFlips (Bot Game): 15356 (from 14k)
• As part of this proposal we finally want to update our Stats page, currently only the old Statistics system we wrote over 2 years ago is still running, we want nice graphs and "number go up" exponential growth ^^

Some ideas from the past didn't work out as we had almost no users for our Android or iOS apps, the decentralized mixing idea wasn't used by many and too heavy on most browsers, plus much more complicated than simply using our mixing service at https://old.mydashwallet.org/mixing (which has mixed over 165 500 DASH so far and is still going strong with around 5 000 DASH being mixed by 500+ parties each month still). Other things like the Discord bot in 2018 and Telegram in 2019 and 2020 have exploded way beyond anyone's expectations. And there was also the script hack of the MyDashWallet website in Summer 2019, which was very sad for users and us and didn't help the website or bot after many users withdrew everything and closed their accounts in July. Strangely enough, in August 2019 we saw even more accounts being opened up again. We only had 2 complains this year from users last year that checked back this year, otherwise the usual support for newer users. In the past 12 months the amount of Dash used by tip accounts, users tipping, mixing, etc. all has more than doubled, so we are happy that we didn't close shop.

Bot Improvements
On Telegram alone we got more tips (mostly from rains) and new users in the last week than ever before (more than 10x increase), there is 30-100 new accounts every day, we haven't seen most of the chat channels before and don't even know whats going on there (we are not in the ~50 channels the bot is in) ^^ With more users also comes more spam and more annoyed people that don't want to see constant "hey, how are you", "dash is the best", "good morning" just for people to grab some of the Dash rain by some active users.
This brings us to the first part of this proposal based on user requests (mostly admins and mods):

• Improve /rain and /tip, handle spam better, exclude banned users, do not count users as active if they only use common phases or copy+paste others and don't really participate in the discussions (which is probably easier said than done)
• Bot improvements and fixes, stability looks fine, but there are still some backend issues that require some restarts from time to time
• Better handling of custom currencies and conversions (we found some bugs when people tip other currencies, mDASH, USD, $, cookies, beers, etc. work fine, but Euro or other cryptos can be buggy when the conversion isn't available from the Binance tickers we had to update to after CoinMarketCap API was not longer free)
• Other general improvements to the help system, balance, sending QR codes, links and removing some of the almost never used commands
• Our bot dev @Xadarius is already on the case and working on all these issues, early fixes should be available this week
• Also shout out to the admins on Telegram, headed by Sidem always checking what is best for the users and Dash

Twitch
After a lot of internal discussions in recent weeks, we scrapped things we don't have time for and looked at feasibility to improve the bot on the most requested fronts:

• Twitch.tv is by far the biggest video game live streaming platform, the biggest competitor Mixer closed down 2 months ago and while Douyu is big in China and AfreecaTV is big in Korea, there aren't many worldwide users.
• Twitch.tv is very open on producers to add whatever they like on their profile, many already accept cryptocurrencies, paypal, patreon or whatever, it is no problem adding a Dash QR code, with our Bot we can make this step super simple
• Many streamers use streamlabs and we will try to integrate that api first, this way it could solve both Twitch and YouTube integration for streamers within the same tool and allow easy notifications if something happens, https://1upcoin.com/ has already done this in the past (it also adds coinbase api to give streamers a wallet already)
• Idea for overview list of streamers that use Dash ala https://1upcoin.com/users
• Twitch.tv chat operates very similar to Telegram and allows creators to add bots like MyDashWalletBot easily and both receive tips from users while streaming, or doing contests, sending out rains to all active users or tipping someone for giving good information. These kinds of chats are usual very active on any streamer with more than a few viewers
• We recently had another game developer addition in our team (see below) and some in our team like to watch twitch while working and have a good insight what motivates users and streamers.
• Dash wants to go deeper into the Gaming Community, Twitch.tv is a good step in the right direction after Dash already got World of WarCraft betting integration via ReadyRaider

One of the most requested feature by streams and content creators was to add more platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Lbry, Slack, Instagram, Snapshat, WhatsApp, Pinterest, TikTok, etc. Most of them don't support bots or crypto in the way MyDashWalletBot works, but we at least talked and researched them in the past. Many times we get asked to add Twitter support and can can point to the existing bot, which is still too hard to use, so we want to improve that as well. Twitter only makes up 2-3% of users, Reddit is even less and Telegram is 90% of activity right now.

YouTube
Together with Twitch.tv for streaming, it also makes sense to allow content creators to monetize their videos on YouTube, which is by far the biggest video platform. The Google Comment API for YouTube got much easier to use, so we think it is a good time to integrate it, shouldn't be too much work and nice fun to see some Dashers interacting with MyDashWalletBot on YouTube and even tipping creators directly for their work (like all the great videos from TheDesertLynx, Amanda, Dash Core, Tao, etc.). We need to be careful as google often changes their api and also bans bots and accounts quickly ..

Towers Game
There is one more thing we want to talk about: Adding Dash to our Game Towers, here is an early mockup of Dash in game currency integration:


Towers is a Multiplayer Real-time strategy (RTS) with Tower Domination as the game mode (most similar game is Mushroom Wars), with a strong focus and coop and user-generated content. In the current iteration we getting it to work on the most important platforms Steam and Android & iOS and getting the 20 Singleplayer Missions done. Our team has been developing games for the past 25 years, we have a ton of experience with triple A games on PC, Xbox and Playstation and all the app stores on Consoles, PC and Mobile Phones and Tablets. Our most recent and most successful project was our Diablo-like RPG game SoulCraft (and its spin offs SoulCraft 2 and our Moba Heroes Of SoulCraft), which was downloaded over 40 million times on all platforms and we still support to this day (but don't develop for anymore since 2017).

Towers is a free to play game, which means anyone can download it on any supported platform for free. Players can buy optionally skins or items via the in-game currency. In later multiplayer battle it is very important for us that all players have exactly the same abilities (think StarCraft, the most successful multiplayer RTS game, still going strong after 22 years) and cannot buy stronger units or abilities, but instead get skins, graphical modifiers, emotes, etc. to show off. In the singleplayer there are certainly helpful items and abilities you can either play for or just buy to skip grinding or help you to get to higher skill levels.
One major problem with the Google Play Store, Apple App Store, Steam or pretty much any other platform games are available nowadays, is that they are Walled Gardens. It is simply not allowed or possible to integrate any other payment option in any game, free or not. Even streaming services are violating App Store policies. Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft are all constantly fighting and game developers simply do not want to fight the rules, this is why you will not find any game on these platforms supporting any cryptocurrency. We cannot change that fact.

However, nothing forbids us from releasing our already free game on our Website, allow people to download the apk for Android (iOS users can't be supported that easily) and use whatever else payment system we like. We think it is a great way to experiment with Cryptocurrencies in games, not just betting or chatting on twitch/youtube/telegram/discord or supporting your favorite caster or producer on Patreon, but simply use it in game all the time like people use Dash on Telegram!

• Players will get mDASH automatically in the game and can spend it like gold or coins in other games
• This mDASH is actually on the blockchain and each player has its own Dash account created via our bot api
• Any player can send any amount he owns to any other player or any address, its his money and Dash is money!
• Players can top up their account by sending Dash, we will make this very easy from within the game via QR codes, copying addresses, linking to services that allow to buy Dash via other payment options
• If possible we could also allow exchanging Dash to gold coins on accounts the player has on Steam, Google Play or Apple, but we don't want to get in trouble with the big guys, so only what is allowed or flies under the radar ;)

Anyway, as part of this proposal we will release an early version of Towers Alpha by the end of the year (the game itself won't be finished by then, development is heating up again now and we are building a small team besides our main Robotics project that can continually develop and support the game). This would still be a great usecase for Dash and anyone can simply point to the game and give an example of a game that fully has integrated Dash.

We use cryptocurrency daily in our office, we have our bot and smart contracts running in our internal tools and chats and we constantly shift money from employee to employee, in Dash, Bitcoin, Usd-N and Waves mostly. However Bitcoin is unusable with the high fees for small amounts, we disabled Eth some time ago as it got way too expensive too (we switched to Waves instead, which supports Dash very well on its internal exchange) and we disabled most other currencies as well as no one was ever using them (like Ltc, Bch, etc. they are not bad fee-wise, we have no one in our office using them).

• What I am saying here is that Dash is a great currency for a local community or group to send money in between each other, even on-chain. We think this concept also applies to in game currencies of games and it is my strong believe this will dominate all in app purchases in the future as it is so much better than the alternatives (huge fees on payment providers, crazy cuts by publishers and platforms, the cut is 30%). We don't have any of these problems, we can send the same one dollar around 50 times without losing even a single cent :)

Cost

• 130 Dash: 25 Dash per month (~$2020 = 1700 euro) for the next 5 months + 5 proposal fee reimbursement
• This is not paying full time for our two developers, but this way they can justify spending a day or two each week on Bot and Dash integration work plus ongoing support
• Most of the things I have explained above are way more complex for others to implement, but we are working on these things anyway and have a great bot api and a pretty good idea on how to add twitch and YouTube support
• Our ongoing work in the Robotics and Machine Learning space is also eating up most of our resources, but we always wanted to return to more Bot work when the time is right :)
• If Dash appreciates in value we will extend support and development, if it depreciates, we still will focus on the most important features like the Bot, Twitch.tv and YouTube

Feedback welcome, you can also contact me any time on Telegram or Discord