Developer brain dump incoming
I'm not at all on top of my incoming messages, so in an attempt to stem the flood and address most of them, here's the current contents of my head.
I feel some are using our rise to illustrate the absurdity of cryptocurrency pricing (
http://uk.businessinsider.com/dogecoin-cryptocurrency-has-market-cap-above-2-billion-2018-1 for example). To me, in an environment where a cryptoasset with $30 USD equivalent transaction fees has a market cap of over a quarter of trillion dollars, I don't think we're the absurd one. Yes we take ourselves less seriously, but that doesn't mean we're not serious behind the scenes. We're a 4 year old currency with transaction fees barely over a cent and significantly higher throughput than most other cryptocurrencies.
That said, now is not the time to pat ourselves on the back, 1.14 needs shipping and we need wider adoption. If you run a service/store, please look into taking Dogecoin. If you don't, please talk to others about how you can help them accept Dogecoin (DO NOT just flood them with emails saying they should, but ask why they don't and what you can do about it).
On that note, lets talk structure of Dogecoin for a second. A lot of people presume Dogecoin is managed by a single coherent entity - this is very much not the case. The founders, current developers, reddit moderators, IRC, social and other teams behave as loosely coupled teams, with our own projects. We talk frequently, but there's no single leadership structure. In common with Bitcoin we have a post-launch dev team; we are not those who decided to launch a coin (that's Jackson & Billy), we saw Dogecoin as it was and decided it was something we wanted to be involved in. We're also not those who missed out on Bitcoin, I was in Bitcoin in 2011, but I didn't believe in how it was designed.
As a consequence of this, "Why is no-one doing <x>?" generally boils down to either "We like it this way" or "Why aren't you doing <x>?".
Most crucially; we're not taking the inflationary coins away because they're why we're in Dogecoin. I said I was in Bitcoin in 2011, and the reason I didn't stick with it is I don't believe in deflationary currencies. Even if we did, we'd have to somehow convince the miners to mine a coin where they weren't paid (which is what the inflation pays for), so the realistic scenario is an inflation-less Dogecoin would either have no miner adoption, or fees matching Bitcoin.
This is typically where someone says something about their investment in Dogecoin. I really can't advise on investments, I bought Bitcoin in 2011 and sold early enough on that I'm typing this from my bedroom rather than a beach, so you probably shouldn't listen to me. I will however say that the developers have a lot less Dogecoin than virtually anyone thinks, and certainly the next dev fund payout is likely to be a significant multiple of my personal holdings, simply because we're post-launch so we've had to buy our Doge the way everyone else had to buy or mine.
What else...
Nodes - I've added a new permanent node in LA, and I'm bringing additional nodes up in Ireland and Seoul now. A bootstrap.dat torrent is being worked on right now, which should help too. If you're running a node please note:
It really needs to be kept online, to ensure it's actually relaying more data than it's consuming
If you can open port 22556 to the world, please do so, it will vastly improve the number of nodes that can connect to you
It's full nodes (those running Dogecoin Core) we need, leaving Multidoge/Android wallet/etc. open doesn't help us very much
1.14 will also significantly improve performance, and is making nice progress. Fees are my next task after this post, and then there's a lot of small items to address, but I'm hoping to get an alpha out shortly. Also I haven't broken testnet yet, which is a nice change compared to 1.10!
We aren't about to introduce paying nodes because it's essentially technically impractical. This could either come from mining rewards (and you can fight either the miners or those who we create too many coins already, for that), or from other receiving nodes themselves. If it's from mining then somehow we'd have to identify contributing nodes, if it's from receiving nodes I'm not sure people are going to be happy with their balance dropping due to network usage. Although it might be a break-even I suppose. Generally, though, paying nodes is called proof of stake, and that's a whole different discussion.
Someone asked about the website - it's being discussed, let me get back to you.
Please treat your Dogecoins and wallet files like you would cash. We can't get them back for you if you send them to the wrong person (if we could, we'd have raided the Dogeparty address and be retired on a beach by now). Keep backups, and never delete old wallets (you never know when you might need a random key from an old wallet).
Full list of changes in 1.14 is coming (although generally if it's in Bitcoin Core 0.14, expect to see it in), but the highlight for me beyond the improved performance is hierarchical deterministic wallets, which mean restoring old wallet backups will recover more recent funds. That should save a lot of lost funds, I hope!
Last one, quick list of Twitter accounts to follow:
Dogecoin:
https://twitter.com/dogecoinDogecoin developers:
https://twitter.com/dogecoin_devsJackson Palmer (founder):
https://twitter.com/ummjacksonMax Keller (lead developer):
https://twitter.com/langer_hansMe (developer, the chatty one):
https://twitter.com/JRossNicollSporklin (community herder):
https://twitter.com/MSingularity42points (reddit moderator):
https://twitter.com/42pointsElf Lyons (random comedian I'm throwing in because she's funny):
https://twitter.com/elf_lyonsI will be reading messages, but your chances of replies are very slim, sorry everyone. Many thanks for all the tips, they are appreciated!
Much wow,
Ross
