If you find the easter egg on that image you get 1 XDOGE.

Merged mining doesn't require anyone to mine anything else, but allows them the option to. It's always up to individual pools, which is why not every bitcoin pool allows merged mining of coins like NMC like they used to when it was valuable. However, you could always mine NMC directly without mining anything else -- it'd be stupid, though. Whether or not it's worthwhile for a pool to permit NMC/similar merged mining, though, is debatable since the value added is so minimal and may be outweighed by the resource requirements of developing the code and using server resources. When these merged SHA256 coins had significant value, pools would usually permit auto-sale of the coins which exchanged to the coin they were mining, so if you were mining BTC, you'd get your normal BTC reward plus a BTC bonus equal to the amount of LTC you earned which was exchanged by the pool. Assuming there is little overlap between DOGE and LTC users, LTC miners on DOGE-merged-enabled LTC pools would probably just have their "bonus DOGE" automatically converted (this can be compensated for by having LTC also offer merged mining if they choose to accept) -- if there's a lot of overlap, people will likely hold both coins and there'd be little effect on price. By DOGE devs saying they don't think there'll be much impact on DOGE price, they're saying a lot of DOGE miners are currently dumping onto the market for fiat or a different coin already or that there's a high amount of crossover between LTC & DOGE users (so they'll hold both).

OTOH, if you could mine LTC and earn DOGE at the same time - that'd be a fantastic option for miners, and make both networks significantly stronger since it'd be more profitable to mine LTC+DOGE rather than any one coin individually (ATM). DOGE wants LTC to implement merged mining, too, because then someone can be on a DOGE pool and still earn LTC, which in turn makes it equally as profitable to "mine DOGE" as it does to mine LTC. Technically, it's a great idea, but I can't imagine the economic incentive for it.

"AuxPoW" sounds like marketing voodoo. What basically happens is that hashes can be used for both chains (rather, DOGE will accept hashes from other networks' chains), and if the hash exceeds the difficulty target for DOGE and you're mining on a DOGE-merged enabled LTC pool, when you solve a block, you'll probably solve a block for both LTC and DOGE (or just DOGE if LTC requires a higher hash at the time, or just LTC if DOGE requires a higher hash at the time). -So it's the same as merged mining from what I read, but DOGE wants other coins to offer merged mining of their coin, too (which I'm not sure if has ever happened before). If you could merged-mine virtually all the Scrypt coins at once, they'd be extremely powerful since they combine their hashrate. Given pools will likely implement automatic selling of coins the miner doesn't want (and many pools, especially auto-switching pools, just sell all of them for BTC), it probably won't have any positive impact on price unless people feel the network isn't strong enough for its price as-is and that's what's causing sell pressure.

AuxPoW implemented by both LTC and DOGE should make both networks' hashrate roughly equal to each other as well as each equaling the hashrate of both of them separately, now (plus much more when implemented, since anyone mining Scrypt will probably want to mine LTC+DOGE over other options). The technical downside of this is that it'll likely dramatically lower hashrate of other Scrypt coins if the price of LTC and DOGE doesn't drop significantly from this.

That's wrong.

I was wondering what AuxPoW means. So AuxPoW = merged mining?

Doge wants LTC to participate in this, but what if LTC refuses? It would make doge look bad.

What this does not mean is that we're tying us to Litecoin. What we do is accepting Proof of Work from their miners if they happen to hit our difficulty target.

Actually we do Bitcoin Only

as we was going to use this for crypto coins  www.coinpayments.net but after setting up we got an email saying they are closing down end of the Month.

what are the predictions short and longterm?

Methods of Payment Accepted
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If those morons at BTC-e get rid of the bribed NVC, fading TRC and FTC and replace with Doge/Quark and another alt things would get better. Trading at BTC-e is much better than those Cryptsy newbs who add every copy&past Crypto to make some fees.