Be your own bank, they said. Secure things yourself, they said.

Anyone got up to date contact details for CleverMining? We're trying to get them to notice there's a major Dogecoin security update and they need to move to 1.10.0 or 1.8.3 as a backup. In particular the BIP 66 DERSIG enforcement requires a block version update, and we need everyone to update for that.

Actually Coinmarketcap now puts us back at #5, between Ethereum and Dash.

Still, do people trust Satoshi, or do they trust the devs that have checked the code over the last 5+ years? When Bitcoin came out it had virtually no value or trust, and I think to date only Dash has had any sort of long-term success with a dev team that's not clearly identifiable (i.e. not just a known name, but you can find background details on the dev team)

$0.00126 per block? We need to motivate the miners to care enough to bother both with storing the blockchain and actually applying updates (this is a particular point right now as we've just released the BIP 66 security fixes which introduce an updated block version). That would work out at... ~$662 per year split between all of the miners.

For comparison, Bitcoin currently pays $8,000 per block (or thereabouts), even adjusting for the block time, that's $800/minute. We currently pay out $1.26/minute. If the two coins had comparable market caps, we'd still be paying out about half what Bitcoin does right now.

Billy dive-rolled out of the project before we actually went for merged-mining in the end, Max/Langerhans was leading by then. Again, could well be Jackson was directing, though, to be honest I was mostly tied up with other stuff at the time, made my argument and mostly got on with coding.

Not a clue about Jackson - I know Billy really never expected to end up running a currency people used, I think Jackson sort of wants to, sort of doesn't want to. We're as independent from him as we can be, at this point, although he still owns the domain name, which complicates matters.

Why would DOGE/LTC become a major thing? Do you mean we'll end up primarily exchanged as people shuffle mining rewards for the coins they actually want?

I sort of want to say "Well we weren't really taking direction from Jackson at that point" but that doesn't necessarily mean nothing happened (apologies for double negative there). FWIW I was backing merged mining in internal discussions for most of last year (coins remaining in conflict for mining power tend to end badly).

With respect to mining schedule (and I wasn't on the dev team when the decision to stick with the code as-is was made), it's very difficult to see Dogecoin having survived it's end of mining from December last year, with zero block rewards, either.

1. Do you mean number of confirmations? Up to the receiving user, but I'd recommend 10+ for high-value transactions. Block time is far faster than Bitcoin, and wall clock time is an important part of the confirmation process.

2. 10kDOGE/block

3. 240 I think, off the top of my head

4. It's fixed per-block now

Not sure that answers your questions?

IANAL, but IMHO anything with centralised issuance (i.e. Ripple) is likely to fall under these laws, although it does depend on whether anyone cares enough to do anything about it. Personally I don't mine, so any coins I have are either bought or donated, which I think covers us fairly well, but obviously that requires a volunteer dev team.

As many posters have said, the majority are a small set of groups just churning out new coins on a production line, persuading new people to mine them until they're listed on an exchange, then dumping and disappearing.

The next biggest group are people who go "You're clearly doing it wrong, get out of the way" and launch a coin, often therein discovering why something was done one way or another.

Another big group is those who launch coins to see how they work (this sounds like a good idea, but isn't, it's a huge amount of work and it's a lot easier to try working with an existing coin).

So what are we doing to actually make cryptocurrencies interesting to new people? So far everyone seems to insist we'll all be rich as soon as someone comes along and actually makes Bitcoin useful, very few people are actually trying to make it useful.

Et tu pegasus?

Seriously, no, bad, don't do this.

Except that major exchanges tend to hold vastly more coins than individuals, so they replace mining pools in being the 51% risk, and (much) worse, their mining security can be anonymously and easily moved if it's accessed by a hacker. See for example MintPal (Viacoin) and Bter (NXT)

Proof of burn is primarily useful for seeding new currencies (see Counterparty from Bitcoin, Dogeparty from Dogecoin), forcing users to destroy value to create coins in another currency. Yeah, wouldn't want to use it for block mining!

It should go without saying that you should only do this with empty wallet.dat files just in case, and not use them afterwards, but pulled about half a BTC of Clam's out of old debug wallets I had, a month back.

One thought is to check whether the transaction and merkle hashes are calculated using SHA256 (as Scrypt coins do, because it's a lot cheaper than using Scrypt) or X13. I think X11 coins often use X11 for identity hashes as well as PoW, might be the same for X13.

To give you an idea of the scale of the task, here's two of about 20 patches to rebrand Bitcoin to Dogecoin: https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/commit/81e0c8ca74c05225629646de3af5236ebd6f0154 https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/commit/c11cf63209ab6cedafd61837bd904126c7c2cddc

It's a fiddly task because you want to modify only values within strings, without modifying the build setup accidentally (which is what happens if you start naively replacing "Bitcoin" with "ExampleCoin"), and must keep all of the translations in sync with your changes.

However, so does everyone else, so what's the motivation to be a dev for a new coin rather than jumping into the Bitcoin bandwagon?

It goes to the miners, who use specialised hardware to solve mathematically hard problems (finding a value to place in the block header such that the SHA256 sum is below a derived value), the work referred to in "proof of work".

Not sure if they're serious, but certainly a LOT of people in my experience think of cryptocurrencies as a company, so they presume by "buying in" the company (and by extension devs) make a profit, and it's not hard to see people believing the same for mining fees. There's a very prevalent attitude of "I bought in, what are the devs doing to make me a profit" and of course the answer is that in a fairly distributed coin, coin devs typically hold a tiny fraction of all coins, and value movement is of very limited relevance to them.

Edit: Yes yes, Satoshi, blah blah... no. Satoshi essentially solo-mined Bitcoin for the first several weeks of its existence, because no-one else was that interested. Any new coin release can expect thousands of miners competing for the block rewards, not one person grabbing all of them for weeks.