Thanks, it was rather late when the update went out last night and basically went to bed, then work, and now I'm here

I'm _hoping_ we'll ship a beta soon, we've got some outstanding build issues with the OS X version that are blocking a beta release, but otherwise it's looking fairly good so far!

I'm here for the memes, myself.

Okay serious answer; the pitch is it's like Bitcoin, but 10x faster, several times the maximum number of transactions (will be 10x if/when we adopt SegWit), a fraction of the cost to use, has an adorable mascot, newbie friendly and the price is less volatile than Bitcoin so it's vaguely possible to price stuff in it. Heck, stores might even be able to keep it and be confident they can pay suppliers with it at the end of the month without it having gained or lost 50% of its value depending on the weather.

We're clear on this isn't something the Dogecoin Core team have released, right? I don't need the extra tech support calls.

Quick update on Dogecoin Core. First up, for everyone who looks at the Github "master" branch and goes "there's no work going on" - guys, we don't develop on the default branch because we don't want people downloading unstable code by accident. 1.14 work is in https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/tree/1.14-branding . 1.15 work is in limbo until 1.14 hits beta, but you can see it at https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/pull/1434

1.14 beta is basically missing three parts:

1. The remaining PRs being merged.
2. Someone with a Mac figuring out why the Mac build doesn't work.
3. A lot of testing.

I'll ship a third alpha once all the PRs are merged, please then test it.

---

Doge/Ethereum stuff - right, so we (Dogecoin Core developers) are working with a third party (Truebit) on a solution for converting Dogecoins to tokens on Ethereum, and much more importantly, then getting the Dogecoins back after (sidechaining). Last update we got from them is that verifying Doge->Ether transactions is still crazy expensive, so we're looking into solutions to that.

Separately, a totally unrelated team have launched what appears to be a new token on an Ethereum blockchain using a snapshot of Doge balances. Which is totally fine, but please stop asking us about it, we don't know anything more than you do, probably a lot less because really we've had our heads stuck in Dogecoin Core for several months.

Guys, this isn't something the Dogecoin founders or the development team responsible for Dogecoin Core are involved in. You can of course jump into whatever projects you like, but please stop asking us about this.

There's work on sidechaining Doge & Ethereum, but that's not a new currency, it's using 1:1 mapped tokens on the Ethereum chain to represent Dogecoins, and they're fixed in value (there's a 1 Doge = 1 Doge joke here, but... seriously, 1 Doge = 1 Doge token in this case). The team working on that is still doing R&D and we don't have any estimated shipping date from them.

Yes, finally, after months of development and beating on it with hammers, Dogecoin Core 1.10 is out now: https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/releases/tag/v1.10.0

BACK UP YOUR WALLET BEFORE YOU UPGRADE. We've had zero problems with upgrades so far, but still, just to be safe.

You will have to reindex on first run of Dogecoin Core 1.10, which will take 2-3 hours. I suggest running it overnight. If you use the QT (graphical) client, it will prompt you. If you run the daemon, use the "-reindex" option when you launch to start the reindex process. Again, this only has to be done once while the index format is updated to add more sanity checks. Your wallet balance will reflect the blocks that have been reindexed, while the process runs, don't panic. Do not attempt to send coins while the reindex runs, however, or you may find you've sent invalid transactions.

This is a major update and a critical security update. If you use Dogecoin Core, you MUST update to 1.10 to remain secure. If you for whatever reason absolutely cannot update (i.e. cannot take a service down to reindex) you can use Dogecoin Core 1.8.3, which contains the most critical fixes: https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/releases/tag/v1.8.3 . Even then, we highly recommend updating later if at all possible.

This release includes all of the changes in Bitcoin Core 0.9 and 0.10, including a huge speed boost to download/sync, a broad range of security fixes, and the framework for future improvements such as blockchain trimming and smart contracts (yes, you read that right, smart contracts).

If you're an individual user please update NOW. If you're a merchant, exchange, payment processor or service provider, please test and update as soon as possible. If you're a miner, please update after the 17th so we have time for the new client to be deployed. This update introduces version 3 blocks (BIP 66 for those who know what that is), which are part of the security fixes, and the more clients update before they're mined, the easier the rollout will be.

To re-iterate - seriously, you need to update. This client has been in testing for literal months, it's stable, there isn't another update just around the corner, get this one.

Payment protocol (BIP 70) can be modified to work over NFC, and basically what we're missing is someone to write a formal spec for how that works (simple enough) and write the code. So, mostly we need more development resources than we have. Any volunteers?

Dogecoin :-D

You can keep using the old wallet, yes. There's a lot of improvements under the hood, though, so once it's a release version we'd recommend upgrading (it's faster, lower memory usage, etc. etc.)

Given there's the rather nasty CVE-2015-3641 in pre-0.10 (details aren't released, but see https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-June/009135.html ), no-one should be using anything less than 0.10 for new coins.

Dogecoin Core 1.10 beta 2

Dogecoin 1.10 is a complete rebuild based on Bitcoin 0.11. This means in terms of the code-base we introduced all the changes between Bitcoin 0.9 and 0.11 into this version of Dogecoin Core. 
We therefore suggest to read the release notes of both Bitcoin 0.10 and Bitcoin 0.11

Beta 2 introduces a number of bug fixes and improvements since beta 1:

* Correct AuxPoW support checks to match Dogecoin Core 1.8 rather than Namecoin
* Correct and expand RPC unit tests
* Add NODE_BLOOM service bit
* Fix missing new line in error messages
* Update testnet checkpoints so syncing is smoother, and add DNS seed
* Correct incompatibilities in fee calculation code compared to Dogecoin Core 1.8
* Remove old Bitcoin release notes
* Replace further references to Bitcoin with Dogecoin where user-facing
* Use locale-specific number formatting instead of thin spaces as thousand-separator in numbers

Upgrading

To upgrade from any version below 1.10 you will need to re-index once, as the block database format has changed. If you run the Qt GUI client, it will prompt you to do so on the first start after the update. If you run a dogecoind daemon, you will need to start it with the parameter `-reindex` once after you updated. This process can take a few hours, depending on the performance of your machine.

Notable changes

For further explanation of these, see the above mentioned Bitcoin release notes.

Faster synchronization

Dogecoin Core 1.10 introduces headers-first and parallel block synchronization to greatly reduce the initial blockchain synchronization time.

Watch only address support

It is now possible to add public keys to your wallet that will be held in a "watch only" state. This means you will get information about incoming/outgoing transactions and resulting balance changes. Especially useful to keep track of your paper wallets.

Strict signature encoding (BIP66)

One of the reasons why mining is disabled on this release is the introduction of [BIP66](https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0066.mediawiki) which enforces strict rules about how transaction signatures are encoded and therefore will introduce a new block version (3). These rules will only activate once a certain number of blocks are mined with this new version. To not let this happen too early, mining is disabled for now. NOTE: This is **not** a hard fork, as all existing wallets will accept version 3 blocks, although they'll fail to enforce the new requirements.

Block file pruning

It is possible to run a Dogecoin node without keeping the full blockchain on your disk. This is currently incompatible with having a wallet on that client due to the fact that some actions regarding a wallet require the full block data. The minimum amount of kept blocks has been changed from Bitcoin to reflect our shorter block times. 

General comments
Please backup your wallet regularly and especially before performing this upgrade. Do not copy your wallet.dat while Dogecoin Core is open. Instead you should either use the backup feature you find in the "File" menu or shut down Dogecoin Core completely before you make a copy of your wallet.dat. 

Dogecoin Core 1.10 Beta 1

Dogecoin 1.10 is a complete rebuild based on Bitcoin 0.11. This means in terms of the code-base we introduced all the changes between Bitcoin 0.9 and 0.11 into this version of Dogecoin Core.  
We therefore suggest to read the release notes of both Bitcoin 0.10 and Bitcoin 0.11  

Upgrading

To upgrade from any version below 1.10 you will need to re-index once, as the block database format has changed. If you run the Qt GUI client, it will prompt you to do so on the first start after the update. If you run a dogecoind daemon, you will need to start it with the parameter `-reindex` once after you updated. This process can take a few hours, depending on the performance of your machine.

Mining

For this beta release, we decided to disable AuxPoW mining, while further testing is completed. The functionality will be re-enabled in a later release candidate.

Notable changes
For further explanation of these, see the above mentioned Bitcoin release notes.

Faster synchronization

Dogecoin Core 1.10 introduces headers-first and parallel block synchronization to greatly reduce the initial blockchain synchronization time.

Watch only address support

It is now possible to add public keys to your wallet that will be held in a "watch only" state. This means you will get information about incoming/outgoing transactions and resulting balance changes. Especially useful to keep track of your paper wallets.

Strict signature encoding (BIP66)

One of the reasons why mining is disabled on this release is the introduction of BIP66 which enforces strict rules about how transaction signatures are encoded and therefore will introduce a new block version (3). These rules will only activate once a certain number of blocks are mined with this new version. To not let this happen too early, mining is disabled for now. NOTE: This is **not** a hard fork, as all existing wallets will accept version 3 blocks, although they'll fail to enforce the new requirements.

Block file pruning

It is possible to run a Dogecoin node without keeping the full blockchain on your disk. This is currently incompatible with having a wallet on that client due to the fact that some actions regarding a wallet require the full block data. The minimum amount of kept blocks has been changed from Bitcoin to reflect our shorter block times.  

General comments

Please backup your wallet regularly and especially before performing this upgrade. Do not copy your wallet.dat while Dogecoin Core is open. Instead you should either use the backup feature you find in the "File" menu or shut down Dogecoin Core completely before you make a copy of your wallet.dat.  

Download

You can find all downloads here: https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/releases/tag/v1.10-beta-1
Please let us know about any bugs you find. Either here or on GitHub
Thanks everyone for their continued support!

Yup, we've done more or less that; there's two branches, 1.10-dev which is everything needed to get network consensus (i.e. it will sync) and a separate 1.10-branding which is everything needed to make it look like Dogecoin (a much bigger, but easier to reproduce change set). We've also restructured our code heavily to make it less invasive to the Bitcoin code, so incoming changes are less likely to be an issue.

I imagine for v0.12 we'll probably rebase these branches to layer our patches on, rather than trying to apply the Bitcoin patches, but generally that's the model we're using. It's been quite positive clearing out all the old cruft and starting new, so I suspect we'll rebuild every few releases anyway (anything generic we push into Bitcoin anyway, so we should never diverge too much).

As we're closing on a beta release for Dogecoin Core 1.10, I wanted to talk about where 1.9 went to, why we haven't had a major release in 11 months, and what we're doing differently in future. This is a long post, but I swear it's worth reading in full.

First of all, important security announcement: If you're using brain wallets (this won't be many of you, but want to ensure we catch anyone who is), stop, and move your funds right now. There was a security talk at DEF CON which basically explained how much their security is broken, more detail at https://rya.nc/cracking_cryptocurrency_brainwallets.pdf . For anyone who's unsure, brain wallets are where you pick a set of words and use them to generate a wallet, such as bip32.org (I'm not linking that) lets you do. If you have been given words by a random process (i.e. Multibit HD, Electrum, Trezor, Ledger), these are AFAIK fine, it's just manually chosen words that are a disaster waiting to happen.

Next, there's a Bitcoin village, at Chaos Communication Camp next weekend, and while the core developers can't attend (we're doing dull day job things instead), Dogerain's developer will be there, and they're organising a video hangout with the Dogecoin core devs. Not sure if others can attend remotely, but if you're at the camp we'd love to get to talk to you!

Right, back to 1.9; Dogecoin Core 1.9 was going to be 1.8 with the Bitcoin Core 0.10 changes merged in. The same process was used to make Dogecoin Core 1.8 from 1.7 with Bitcoin Core 0.9, so we knew what we were doing. With almost 1,300 commits to review and apply it would take a while, but in theory was straight forward enough. A spreadsheet was created to track progress amongst the developers, and in January we set out to start merging.
At this point we discovered several things:

* Some patches from 0.10 had been merged in early and out of sequence, so we had to avoid merging them twice.
* A lot of the changes were less readily compatible with Dogecoin Core than we expected.
* 1,300 is really a lot of changes

As time dragged on, we gained further assistance (Sporklin, this means you) in preparing merged commits, and I made several attempts at automating much of the process. Around March we started struggling with keeping development motivation up, and pace faltered, with Sporklin taking on much of the charge to keep work continuing. In June, we were about half way, and Bitcoin Core 0.11 hit release candidate, and at that point we realised this wasn't going to work.

So, Dogecoin Core 1.10 is a rebuild. We've started with Bitcoin Core 0.11 as a base and then manually re-applied the Dogecoin changes. This makes a lot of sense, in as much as they're a smaller set of changes (and less invasive by design), but does mean that we risk losing subtle tweaks to the code (which is what the beta period is intended to help catch). Most of the changes have been totally rewritten to make them simpler to apply, and better fit in with the hugely revised code base. We also see a significant number of changes in the strings with Dogecoin, so previous improvements to translations cannot necessarily be used as-is, and when we hit beta we'll be looking for help with updating translations.

The loss of motivation is something we need to be more aware of as a risk; while the Dogecoin developers are not doing this to try getting rich, that doesn't mean that there's no motivation required. We enjoy the challenge and opportunity to work with interesting technology, and based on that it's important that we ensure the work does have its interesting parts in amongst just getting stuff shipped.

Looking ahead to future work:
* We'll do a full rebuild once per year, potentially twice, to keep us close to the Bitcoin Core code and ensure compatibility.
* In between these rebuilds, we'll merge in changes where feasible.
* To avoid Dogecoin and Bitcoin diverging, we'll push new features and fixes into the relevant upstream project where practical. We avoid divergence because it makes it harder to update, and requires custom code to adopt Dogecoin compared to Bitcoin.
* Dogecoin Core will be promoted as the reference base for other Scrypt-based altcoins. This happens already, and we get fixes from downstream (i.e. Fractalcoin caught that the fork detection code is too sensitive) as a result.

I know there are those who wish to see Dogecoin split further from Bitcoin, but there's just far too much effort being poured into Bitcoin, and too much available expertise from working with them, to ignore.

On a related note, bitcoinj 0.14 now has all of the changes to make it work with the libdohj wrapper library. Patrick's been testing libdohj, and so far mostly it seems to work well (there's an issue with the advertised network protocol version that I need to fix, but apart from that so far so good). There's a similar model for python-bitcoinlib and python-altcoinlib, although I need to dust off python-altcoinlib somewhat.

There's tons more I could write about HD wallets, user defined consensus or Ledger wallet support, but I think that's quite enough for today. There will be an interim update for Dogecoin Core 1.10 work around next weekend, hopefully a beta around the same sort of time, and the next full update post should be on the 23rd or thereabouts.

Something we're considering is allowing user-defined consensus parameters. Essentially rather than us being the gatekeepers for changes like supply or mining algorithm, we load these from disk at startup. Want to cut the supply? Update the config, and then convince others to adopt your new configuration. Want bigger blocks? Same. Faster/slower blocks? Same.

Risk is basically we're handing the community loaded guns and directions to their own feet, but I think it may help people better understand what changes we can't make (because no-one will mine them / exchanges won't touch them / both), and some good points have been made that a coin isn't truly leaderless if only a small group can make important changes. This won't be until after Dogecoin Core 1.10 ships (next month with a little luck), though.

1. Err, there's slightly over 100 billion coins out there already, that might be tricky (I mean impossible) to do. Also we'd then literally be Bitcoin with a dog on it.
2. PoS still has the issue that it encourages exchanges to keep coins online (to stake them), and makes the "mining" asset (coins instead of hardware) trivially and anonymously movable. See the issues with Vericoin being essentially destroyed by the Mintpal hack, and NXT barely escaping a similar fate with Bter.

The plan, as always, is to be an adoption coin. We're not here to make anyone rich (I mean, sure, some people might, but Doge's never going to make me rich, certainly), we're here to be friendly, easy to pick up, easy to get, and to push the technology out to more people. Immediate priority is the Dogecoin Core 1.10 (based on Bitcoin Core 0.11, so you get blockchain pruning, headers-first downloads, etc. etc.), then HD wallets to make it easier for people to handle wallet backups (and ties neatly into the at least two hardware wallets planning Dogecoin support).

No, the main mining period is 100billion, but it then switches to a constant 10kDOGE/block to subsidise mining fees (which is why Doge is at around $0.0001 fees for each transaction rather than the $0.03 and rising that BTC has). That gives it a steadily decreasing inflation rate, of about 4-5% this year and trending towards 0 in the very long term. This is also mitigated somewhat by lost coins and those burnt to make other cryptoassets (i.e. Dogeparty)

Wanted to give you all a quick update on the upcoming Dogecoin Core 1.10 release. Dogecoin Core 1.10 (don't ask about 1.9, it went badly, there will be a postmortem later) will bring Dogecoin up to date with the features of Bitcoin Core 0.11, as well as being a huge architectural clean up. We've started again from scratch from Bitcoin Core 0.11 and rebuilt Dogecoin around that client, rather than gluing updates into the existing codebase, resulting in much cleaner code.

For the technical, there code in Github is now alpha quality, full details on reddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoindev/comments/3fia1p/dogecoin_core_110_alpha_1/

For everyone else, a beta should be out later this month, and we'll have a clearer release schedule from there.

There's binaries on Github: https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/releases/tag/v1.8.2

The new client introduces changes to the user interface from Bitcoin Core, and I'd like to think about the font we used. I've made screenshots of Dogecoin Core 1.10 with Comic Sans (the existing font) and Comic Neue (a more recent alternative), and uploaded them to: http://imgur.com/Ygf0cfi,VPAycuS#0

Please take a look and then pick your preferred font on the survey at: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1ZnxbXJRRuaoRCia2oBClTwr-m-1EoJ2IPBJIs_QoCDk/viewform?usp=send_form