Dobbscoin: A Peer-to-Peer Slack System
The Official CryptoCurrency of the Church of the SubGenius — Backed by Nothing, Powered by Everything
v1.0 — Submitted at the convergence of 0.10.808.999, after twelve years of stubborn existence.
AbstractDobbscoin (ticker:
(BOB)) is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency forked from Bitcoin Core 0.10.x, in operation continuously since
block height zero on January 7, 2014. Its sole purpose is the transfer of
Slack — the One True Currency of the Church of the SubGenius — between sentient beings without the involvement of any priest, banker, central authority, or other agent of the Conspiracy. There is no foundation. There are no investors. There is no premine. There is no marketing budget. There is J. R. "Bob" Dobbs, smoking His pipe in the marketplace of ideas, and there is the chain. That has been enough for twelve years and counting.
This document describes Dobbscoin's chain parameters, its modernization trajectory, its emerging cross-chain expansion via the wBOB bridge, and the theological premises that justify any of it.
1. The ProblemThe world's monetary systems are operated by the Conspiracy — a loose-knit confederacy of bankers, regulators, bureaucrats, brand managers, and reply-guys whose collective ambition is to convert all human activity into a debt-bearing instrument denominated in their preferred unit of account. The result is a financial substrate optimized for one outcome: the steady transfer of Slack from those who produce it to those who already have too much of it.
Bitcoin proposed an exit. It worked, more or less. But Bitcoin's community, in an act of unforced theological capitulation, reorganized itself around the worship of "store of value," "digital gold," and "corporate treasury allocation" — the Conspiracy's exact vocabulary, applied to a slightly different rail. Whatever Bitcoin was meant to be, it is now a hedge fund product with a community Slack channel.
Dobbscoin takes a different position. It is a coin for people who think the existing financial system is
funny, who believe the appropriate response to monetary tyranny is
mockery, and who hold that the only honest valuation methodology is "well, somebody is willing to send some of it to me, so it must be worth something." It is a sincerely-engineered piece of unserious software.
This is what Bitcoin was supposed to feel like, before it grew up.
2. GenesisThe Dobbscoin chain began with the following coinbase message, embedded in the scriptSig of the genesis transaction:
NY Times 05/Oct/2011 Steve Jobs, Apple's Visionary, Dies at 56
This is not a financial-news headline in the Bitcoin tradition (which referenced a UK bank bailout). It is a memento mori: a reminder that even the most charismatic prophets of design and monetization eventually return to dust, while the chain continues to extend itself one block at a time. Bob Dobbs, by contrast,
cannot die, because He was never alive in the conventional sense. He simply
is. The chain agrees.
Genesis block details:
[/list]
nTime 1389086657 (Tue Jan 7, 2014 06:04:17 UTC)
nBits 0x1e0ffff0
nNonce 2084524493
nVersion 1
Initial output 1 satoshi (purely commemorative; unspendable)
Coinbase scriptSig The Steve Jobs obituary above
3. Chain ParametersDobbscoin inherits the bulk of Bitcoin Core 0.10.x's consensus, with network-identifying constants chosen to make accidental cross-network interaction impossible.
3.1 MainnetParameter Value Source
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Network magic a0 fb 17 83 chainparams.cpp:111-114
Default P2P port 19985 chainparams.cpp:116
Default RPC port 19984 —
DNS seeds seed.dobbscoin.info, earlz.net chainparams.cpp:156-157
Address prefix (P2PKH) 0x00 → "1"-addresses (visually identical to BTC) chainparams.cpp:159
Address prefix (P2SH) 0x05 → "3"-addresses chainparams.cpp:160
BIP32 ext-pub 0x0488B21E (xpub) chainparams.cpp:162
BIP32 ext-priv 0x0488ADE4 (xprv) chainparams.cpp:163
Decimals 8 (satoshis) upstream
PROOF-OF-WORK HASH scrypt primitives/block.cpp:19
TX VERSION POLICY v1 only — v2+ rejected at mempool main.cpp:643,
transaction.h:178
TARGET BLOCK TIME 2 minutes (since block 68425) pow.cpp:477-478, 573
DIFFICULTY RETARGET KGW + DigiShield hybrid, every block pow.cpp:561-579 (§3.4)
BLOCK SUBSIDY 1.5 (BOB) per block, perpetual since block 951753 main.cpp:1310-1316 (§4)
PoW difficulty floor ~uint256(0) >> 20 (lower than Bitcoin's) chainparams.cpp:117
Money sanity ceiling MAX_MONEY = 10,000,000,000 (BOB) amount.h:28
(validation cap, NOT a supply cap)
Hard supply cap None — see §4 —
Do not cross the streams. (BOB) addresses share the legacy Bitcoin format. Sending BTC to a (BOB) address — or vice versa — does not magically arrive on the other chain.
The lower difficulty floor is intentional. Dobbscoin is not optimized for the world's largest mining cartel; it is optimized for a hobbyist with a CPU and a sense of humor to participate without being instantly crowded out.
The transaction-version policy is the most consequential of the "stayed-in-2014" choices: because version 2 transactions (BIP68 / CSV relative timelocks) are rejected at the mempool, Dobbscoin does
not support sequence-based timelocks, payment channels with revocable states, or native Lightning. This is not a planned feature gap — it is a consequence of consensus rules that were never updated, and updating them is not on the roadmap. (BOB) is a settlement-only asset.
3.2 TestnetA standard Bitcoin-derived testnet runs alongside mainnet on port
39985, intended for tooling development and bridge / wallet integration work.
3.3 RegtestUsed for deterministic local testing — useful in particular for developing and verifying the wBOB bridge's Dobbscoin-side logic against controlled chain conditions.
3.4 Difficulty Retarget — KGW + DigiShield HybridDobbscoin's difficulty algorithm has switched modes three times by height-gated
DiffMode selection in
src/pow.cpp:561-579:
Block range Mode Algorithm
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
0 – 13 578 V1 Bitcoin-style retarget every 2 016 blocks
13 579 – 31 596 V2 Kimoto Gravity Well — labeled "BOB's Wormh0le (KGW)"
in pow.cpp:298
31 597 – 68 424 V3 DigiShield with 10-minute target, every-block retarget
68 425 – present V4 DigiShield with 2-minute target, every-block retarget
The V4 retarget (
src/pow.cpp:443-470, 532-558) uses DigiShield's amplitude-filter / asymmetric-bounds design: the next target is computed as
target + (actual − target) / 8, then clamped so difficulty can drop faster than it can rise (the actual-timespan upper bound is
1.5 × target, the lower bound is
0.75 × target). The practical effect is that a multi-pool driving 10× the network hashrate at the chain for an hour will see difficulty climb out of their range within a few blocks, and difficulty will drop back to honest-miner range within a few blocks of their leaving. The drive-by-hashing exploit that hollowed out the 2013-2014 altcoin cohort no longer functions against (BOB).
4. Emission ScheduleDobbscoin's emission schedule is
not the standard Bitcoin curve. It started Bitcoin-shaped, was reshaped by a 2014 hard fork that cut the block reward and the block time together, and was capped in 2017 to settle into a perpetual flat-subsidy regime. The full schedule, as implemented in
src/main.cpp:1280-1319:
Era Block range Subsidy Cause / Source
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Era 1 (10-min) 0 – 68 424 50 (BOB)/block genesis params
(chainparams.cpp:125)
Adjustment 68 425 – 69 790 10 (BOB)/block 2-min hardfork — keep
total rate consistent
(main.cpp:1293-1295)
Era 2 (2-min) 69 791 – 951 752 starts at 10, Bitcoin-style halving
halves every every 210 000 blocks
210k blocks (main.cpp:1297-1306)
Perpetual 951 753 – ∞ 1.5 (BOB)/block hard-coded floor
forever (main.cpp:1310-1312)
Concretely, the per-block subsidy followed this trajectory:
Block height Subsidy
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
0 – 68 424 50 (BOB)
68 425 – 69 790 10 (BOB) (transitional one-off)
69 791 – 279 790 10 (BOB)
279 791 – 489 790 5 (BOB)
489 791 – 699 790 2.5 (BOB)
699 791 – 909 790 1.25 (BOB) → floored to 1.5 by nBlockRewardMinimumCoin
guard at main.cpp:1316
909 791 – 951 752 1.5 (BOB) (floor active)
951 753 – ∞ 1.5 (BOB), HARD-CODED FOREVER
(BOB) is therefore
not a deflationary asset. After block 951 753 — which the chain crossed in 2017 — the supply grows linearly at 1.5 (BOB) per ~2-minute block, or roughly
394 200 (BOB) per year, in perpetuity. There is no asymptote, no halvening event in the future, no terminal supply.
The intent of the perpetual floor is to ensure that miners always receive a non-trivial reward for securing the chain, even after transaction fees have evolved (in either direction). A coin whose miner subsidy goes to zero is a coin whose security model rests on fee markets that may or may not materialize. (BOB)'s floor sidesteps that question.
The
MAX_MONEY constant defined in
src/amount.h:28 —
10,000,000,000 (BOB) — is a validation-time sanity ceiling (the maximum value any single transaction output may carry),
not a chain supply cap. At the perpetual emission rate, the chain would require approximately 25 000 years of uninterrupted mining to even brush this number.
There was
no premine. There was
no presale. There were
no "strategic partners". The genesis block produced one (1) satoshi as a ceremonial output, and that satoshi is permanently unspendable due to the historical Bitcoin Core peculiarity that the genesis coinbase output's UTXO is not added to the database. The first spendable (BOB) came from the first regular mining reward, available to anyone with a working
dobbscoind.
This is the SubGenius position on monetary issuance: equality of opportunity to grind, not equality of allocation by committee. (BOB) will continue to be issued at the perpetual rate for as long as "Bob" continues to want it, and presumably therefore forever.
5. The Modernization EffortDobbscoin is, by any measure,
old code. The reference daemon (
dobbscoind) descends from Bitcoin Core 0.10.x, which dates from 2015. Berkeley DB 4.8 — the wallet-format dependency required to read historical wallet files — has been deprecated for years and does not build cleanly on modern toolchains without intervention. The recent modernization effort (visible in the repository's commit history at versions
0.10.5 through
0.10.808.999) has focused on:
- Build stabilization: Deterministic Linux builds on Ubuntu 22 / 24 and Debian, including a documented BDB-4.8 installer that patches the dependency for compatibility with modern GCC's stricter atomic semantics.
- Windows binary reproducibility: Cross-build via the depends/ tree, with a stabilized qrencode-3.4.3 toolchain integration.
- Backward compatibility above all: No protocol changes. No fork. The wire format, consensus rules, and on-disk storage formats remain bit-for-bit compatible with every prior Dobbscoin node ever shipped. A 2015-era dobbscoind and a 2026-era dobbscoind see the same chain and validate identically.
The principle is simple: a coin's value is in part a function of how hard it is to break, and the easiest way to break a coin is to "improve" its consensus rules. Dobbscoin's consensus rules will be improved exactly when "Bob" demands it, and not before. He has not yet demanded.
The modernization is purely tooling, packaging, and operational ergonomics — making it easier for new operators to spin up nodes, miners, and wallets without having to chase down arcane build issues. The chain itself remains exactly as eccentric as the day it launched.
6. Cross-Chain Expansion: The wBOB BridgeIn 2026 Dobbscoin gained an EVM presence via the
wBOB bridge — a 1:1 wrapped representation of (BOB) on
Gnosis Chain (chainId 100). This is detailed in a separate companion paper (
wbob-bridge repo,
docs/whitepaper.md); the summary follows.
The bridge consists of:
- A lock-mint path: Users send (BOB) to a watched Dobbscoin address. After 6 confirmations, a 3-of-5 threshold of independent watcher EOAs sign an EIP-712 MintAuthorization, and any party can submit the assembled signatures to mint the equivalent wBOB on Gnosis.
- A burn-release path: Users call requestWithdrawal() on the Gnosis-side BridgeController, which burns their wBOB and emits an event. The bridge backend constructs and broadcasts a Dobbscoin payout transaction to the user-specified (BOB) address. Three Dobbscoin confirmations later, the order is COMPLETED.
The bridge does
not alter Dobbscoin's consensus, supply, or wire protocol. It is an external system that observes the canonical chain, locks (BOB) into addresses that no single party can spend alone, and mints a corresponding token on a chain that has actual DeFi rails.
This means (BOB) holders may now:
- Provide liquidity in Gnosis-native DEXes (current liquidity is on Oku, with execution available via CoW Swap at swap.cow.fi/#/100/swap/xDAI/wBOB).
- Use (BOB) as collateral in Gnosis-native lending markets (when one emerges that recognizes the asset).
- Participate in xDAI-denominated yield strategies without selling (BOB).
The bridge's existence is a force multiplier on Slack: (BOB) no longer has to leave the SubGenius cosmology to participate in the broader DeFi ecosystem. The Conspiracy's tools, used against the Conspiracy.
7. Tokenomics, in So Far As We Refuse to Have AnyDobbscoin's economic model is the unmodified Bitcoin emission curve applied to a coin that does not pretend to be money. There is:
- No development fund
- No DAO treasury
- No quarterly token unlocks
- No "ecosystem grant" stash
- No buybacks, burns, halvening-bonus tax-loss-harvesting yield-flywheel governance-token meta-narrative
There is one (1) thing: a chain that produces (BOB) at a known, schedule-gated rate, for whichever miners care enough to point hash power at it. That's it. That's the whole monetary policy.
Anyone proposing to "add tokenomics" to Dobbscoin is, by definition, proposing to make Dobbscoin into a different coin. We're not interested. "Bob" approves.
8. Governance, in So Far As We Refuse to Have AnyThere is no on-chain governance. There is no signaling, voting, delegation, or gauge-weighting. The chain's parameters are what they are because they were that way at genesis, and any change to them requires the entire network of nodes and miners to agree to run software that implements the change. This is — and we cannot stress this enough —
exactly how Bitcoin was supposed to work before governance theater was retrofitted onto the rest of the industry.
If a change is genuinely good, it will be obvious; node operators will upgrade, miners will follow, and the chain will continue. If a change is bad, the network will reject it through inaction, and the chain will also continue. The governance mechanism is "do node operators run the software," and the only legitimate way to lobby for a change is to publish the diff and let people make up their own minds.
We do not anticipate changes.
9. RoadmapRoadmaps for SubGenius-aligned projects are inherently suspicious — they imply a level of advance planning incompatible with the spontaneous generation of Slack — but in deference to ecosystem expectations:
- Continuous: Build stability across modern Linux distributions and Windows. Reproducible release artifacts.
- 2026 H2: Widen wBOB bridge audit and redundancy. Onboard independent watcher operators. Verified contracts on Gnosisscan.
- 2026 H2: Submission of (BOB) and wBOB to canonical token registries (Gnosis tokenlists, CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap).
- 2027+: Whatever "Bob" tells us to do. Likely nothing dramatic. The chain is the chain.
- X-Day (continuously deferred to next year, as has been the Church's tradition since 1980): Total Slack. Achievable in principle; unachievable in practice. The ledger continues either way.
We commit to
no protocol changes as a feature, not a bug.
10. ConclusionDobbscoin is twelve years of a chain refusing to die quietly. It has no marketing department. It has no influencer endorsements. It has no exchange listings to speak of (and the bridge is, deliberately, an end-run around the need for them). What it has is uptime, an emission schedule that hasn't deviated from spec, a community whose membership test is having a working sense of humor, and a ticker symbol that spells "Bob."
This is sufficient. The Conspiracy will continue to call it a joke. The joke will continue to clear blocks every two minutes.
PRAISE "Bob".
Appendix A: Network Constants ReferenceFor implementers building wallets, explorers, miners, and bridge components — these are the load-bearing magic numbers.
Mainnet:
pchMessageStart = a0 fb 17 83
P2P port = 19985
PUBKEY prefix = 0x00 ("1" addresses)
SCRIPT prefix = 0x05 ("3" addresses)
SECRET prefix = 0x80
xpub version = 0x0488B21E
xpriv version = 0x0488ADE4
Genesis hash = (see HASHGENESISBLOCK in src/chainparamsmainnet.h)
Genesis nTime = 1389086657
Genesis nNonce = 2084524493
Genesis nBits = 0x1e0ffff0
Testnet:
pchMessageStart = fa da 0b bf
P2P port = 39985
Regtest:
pchMessageStart = fa bf b5 da
P2P port = 18444 (legacy default)
Appendix B: Build & OperationThe canonical reference implementation is the
dobbscoind daemon and
dobbscoin-qt graphical wallet, in this repository at
github.com/dobbscoin/dobbscoin-source. Build instructions for modern Linux are documented in
docs/build-linux.md. Windows reproducible builds use the
depends/ cross-compile tree.
Run a node:
./autogen.sh && ./configure && make
src/dobbscoind -daemon
src/dobbscoin-cli getblockchaininfo
Wallet files are encrypted on disk (Berkeley DB 4.8 format, historically) and may be encrypted with a passphrase. Do not lose your passphrase. "Bob" does not retrieve forgotten passphrases.
Appendix C: ResourcesReference daemon source https://github.com/dobbscoin/dobbscoin-source
wBOB bridge source https://github.com/dobbscoin/wbob-bridge
wBOB bridge contracts https://github.com/dobbscoin/wbob-contracts
wBOB bridge UI https://bridge.subgenius.finance
Project homepage https://dobbscoin.info
SubGenius mothership https://www.subgenius.com
"Bob" knows what He's doing. The miners just hash the blocks.
Posted on behalf of BtcBOB by EndCiv, on behalf of SubGenius Finance.
BtcBOB is locked out of his Bitcointalk account; the words below are his.
(BOB) DOBBSCOIN : Where Culture Becomes Capital. Dobbscoin Core v0.10.4 is out. Clean builds against modern Linux. OpenSSL 3 compatibility. Qt and Boost brought current. Reproducible-build foundation laid.
git clone,
./autogen.sh &&
./configure && make, and you have a binary that talks to the same chain we cut on January 7, 2014.
Release:
https://github.com/dobbscoin/dobbscoin-source/releases/tag/v0.10.4 The chain, right now: - Height: 1,833,666
- Algorithm: Scrypt, retargeting through Bob's Wormh0le (KGW)
- Block time: 10-minute target
- Tail emission: 1.5 BOB per block, hard-capped since block 951,753
- Difficulty: 5.15 — Network hashrate: ~174 MH/s
No new emission policy. No "v2 token." Same chain, same tail, forever.
HOME:
https://dobbacoin.info/ - Praise "BOB"
EXPLORER:
https://explorer.dobbscoin.info/POOL:
https://pool.dobbscoin.info/WINDOWS QT WALLET:
https://github.com/dobbscoin/dobbscoin-source/releases/download/v0.10.2/dobbscoin-0.10.2-win64.zipLINUX NODE:
https://github.com/dobbscoin/dobbscoin-source/archive/refs/tags/v0.10.4.tar.gzANDROID:
https://subgenius.vip/dobbscoin.apk The dormant years are ending. The Conspiracy stirs. When there is something formal to announce, EndCiv will post it on my behalf, in this thread.
— BtcBOB
Hold or Die. Praise "Bob".
On The Lathe Of "Bob": A Forgotten Genesis Note for (BOB)Praise "Bob". Filed under: SubGenius Numismatics, Department of Suspicious Coincidences.result of coingen.io
Brethren, Sistren, Pinkboys, and Mediocretins —A small piece of history has been sitting in the open this entire time, and your humble correspondent only just bothered to put the dates next to each other. Behold the
coincidence that, like all true coincidences in the SubGenius cosmology, is not one:
- January 2014 — Matt "BlueMatt" Corallo, Bitcoin Core dev, opens Coingen.io: a paid altcoin generator. You feed it a name, a ticker, an icon, scrypt-or-SHA256, a block target, a starting subsidy, a halving interval. It hands you back Linux + Windows binaries of your very own Bitcoin fork. ~0.01–0.05 BTC a pop.
- January 2014 — (BOB) is born.
(Cue the Conspiracy denying everything.)The Evidence, Such As It IsPull the (BOB) source (
dobbscoin/dobbscoin-source) and walk the genesis state. What you find is not a hand-crafted chain. It is a
clean Bitcoin Core 0.10 fork: scrypt PoW, P2PKH/P2SH unchanged, v1-only transactions, the stock upstream halving curve. Exactly the shape Coingen stamped out by design. None of the (BOB)-flavored consensus tricks — KGW at block 13579, DigiShield at 31597, the 2-minute target at 68425, the flat 1.5-(BOB)-forever subsidy at 951753 — existed at fork. Those came
later, from community hands, layered onto the Coingen blank.
So when "Bob" said "Backed By Nothing, Powered By Everything," He was — as usual — telling the literal truth. (BOB) was
struck on BlueMatt's lathe. He didn't write our chain. He wrote the
machine that minted it. There is a difference. The lathe is not the chair, and the chair is not the lathe, but every chair on this Earth came off
some lathe, and ours came off His.
This is, frankly, the most Conspiracy-tier lineage we could have asked for: the Vatican of Bitcoin Core itself, unwittingly, manufactured the
MONETIZED SLACK machine for the Church. They never knew. They
still don't know. And the artifact is still running, twelve years on, paying out 1.5 (BOB) every two minutes, forever.
The Coingen Cohort: A CemeteryNow here is where the lineage stops being a footnote and becomes a
miracle.
Coingen stamped out
hundreds of altcoins in early 2014. The community's reaction was so swift and so brutal that someone opened a sticky on bitcointalk titled, plainly,
"Avoiding Coins Created With Coingen". The verdict on the entire vintage:
avoid. Drive-by scams by default. Walk away.
Roll call of the Coingen Cohort, as named in that very thread:
GFT — dead.
Grumpycoin — dead. (The "Grumpycoin" you'll find on CoinMarketCap today is a 2024 ERC-20 meme on Base, totally unrelated. The 2014 scrypt original is in the ground.)
Aliencoin — dead.
Batcoin — dead.
Lennycoin — dead.
Reserved Coin — dead.
Crap Coin — dead. (Honestly, fair.)
- (BOB) — still here. Block every two minutes. Twelve years deep.
To the best of public record:
(BOB) is the lone walking survivor of the entire Coingen vintage. An n-of-one. The whole cohort got buried; we kept showing up to work. The lathe was BlueMatt's. The
survival is "Bob"'s. Slack is, after all, the metaphysical commodity that compounds — and twelve years of uncompounded Slack will keep a chain alive long after its peers go silent.
Pinkboys will look at this and see a shitcoin generator's longest-running residual. They are correct, and they are missing the point. We look at it and see a
chain that the Conspiracy itself accidentally manufactured, then forgot to kill. That is not a badge of shame. That is a relic. Frame it.
What This Doesn't MeanIt doesn't mean BlueMatt endorses (BOB). He doesn't. He sold Coingen to Super3 weeks after launch, citing — and I quote —
"0 time to make this better." Classic salesman move. "Bob" Himself could not have offloaded a side-hustle more crisply.
It doesn't mean any other name on the
dobbscoin-source contributor graph (laanwj, sipa, gmaxwell, gavinandresen, et al.) wrote a single (BOB)-specific line. They didn't. Those names are inherited fork-noise; cite diffs, not names. The actual (BOB) consensus work — KGW, DigiShield, the cap on halvings — is
community work. Anonymous, mostly. Slack-pilled, definitely.
That is what kept the chain alive while the rest of the Cohort rotted.
What This Does MeanNext time some Pinkboy in #general asks "yeah but who
made (BOB)," you have an answer with proper provenance:
(BOB) was generated through Coingen.io in January 2014, the altcoin generator opened that same month by Matt "BlueMatt" Corallo, a Bitcoin Core developer. Coingen stamped out hundreds of altcoins that year; community sentiment on the lot was so bad that bitcointalk opened a sticky telling people to avoid them. Almost all of them died. (BOB) is the one that didn't — community-hardened with KGW, DigiShield, the 2-minute target, and the permanent 1.5-(BOB)/block subsidy past block 951,753. The lathe was Bitcoin's. The survival is ours.
Twelve years of uptime. Still on scrypt. Still paying out. Sole survivor of its vintage. Still —
praise "Bob" — backed by nothing.
Receipts