I believe community is the most important attribute of a coin, and Dogecoin has a strong community when compared to other alt-coins.
That being said, it seems to me that DOGE has a huge glaring problem:
I understand that by January 2015 (8 months from now), the dogecoin inflation rate will have dropped to 10,000 DOGE per minute. Right now the market value of 1 DOGE is approximately equal to 1 bit. If we assume that dogecoin has the same value relative to bitcoin in January 2015, then the inflation rate per hour would be roughly 1 bit/DOGE x 10,000 DOGE / min x 60 min / hour = 600,000 bits = 0.6 BTC / hour.
In a competitive market, the cost to mine a coin should be roughly equal to the market value of the coins mined. This suggests that the cost to 51% attack the DOGE network would be a measly 0.6 BTC / hour. At today's price for bitcoin, that is only $262 per hour.
Can the litecoin miners easily mine dogecoin? If this is the case, what is stopping a malicious pool from paying out litecoin miners slightly more than the litecoin inflation rate for their hash power, and then use that hashpower to 51% attack doge? In fact, there could be a large profit motive to do so if the attacker could build up a large short position in DOGE prior to switching the hash power from "nice" to "attack mode."
It seems like someone will be motivated to kill dogecoin by next January unless something significant changes. Could Dogecoin be merge mined with Litecoin to increase its hashrate? Or could dogecoin by
spun-off into a PoS consensus network?
Is no one else worried about the huge drop in network hashrate relative to the total pool of available script hashpower that DOGE will experience over the next 8 months? Or am I missing something and this isn't actually a problem or has already been solved?