The rise of Dogecoin, the internet's hottest cryptocurrency | Hacker News Reader

The rise of Dogecoin, the internet's hottest cryptocurrency

theage.com.au

142 pointsyitchelle144 comments

The rise of dogecoin interests me because I think it demonstrates a problem with cryptocurrencies - mining becomes too prohibitive for the end user to do before the currency becomes mainstream.

Early on, the opportunity of bitcoin was huge. You mine a little, the value of your coins just keeps on rising. Now you can't mine any meaningful level of currency yourself, so the entry level has raised dramatically.

So why not move onto a different currency? Get in early. Get a stack of currency. Then that'll become too difficult to mine and newcomers will move onto the next. And the next.

That is the fundamental misconception in regards to the crypto-currrency and (in my opinion) indicative of why they will probably never catch on in any mainstream fashion. If the currency was successful, the end user was never intended to be able to mine a meaningful level of currency themselves. The act of mining is required to facilitate transactions and miners get a small part of those transactions for participating. The initial payouts are there solely (in theory) as incentive for the early adopters to mine when the transaction volume is small and to allow them to give the currency an early liquidity. In practice, because of the deflationary nature of the coin and the domination of speculation over transactions involving some tangible goods or services, people are hoarding them expecting increases in value. This is not a good hallmark of a currency and is a flaw that all the derivative coins fail to address.

> people are hoarding them expecting increases in value. This is not a good hallmark of a currency and is a flaw that all the derivative coins fail to address.

This is the fundamental problem with all non-fiat currencies and is why the world moved off the gold standard

No, it's a fundamental problem with all upstart currencies that have yet to gain widespread adoption. All currencies are going to start off at $0, being worth nothing. Obviously the price can only go up as adoption occurs. So any start-up currency has a "growth phase" during which its value increases exponentially. It will never make sense to spend a start-up currency during this phase.

The utility of the currency will depend on how many vendors ultimately accept it. And during the growth phase the number of vendors also increases exponentially. For the very same reason it doesn't make any sense to spend the currency during this time it makes a lot of sense to accept the currency during this time.

The reason a lot of us have invested in BitCoins at this stage is that we believe the growth phase will be followed by a stable phase, where adoption has reached an equilibrium or a saturation point. It is during this phase that the coin becomes a currency which makes sense to spend, and its utility as a currency can be realized.

We may be wrong; we may be right. Currencies have always been issued by governments before now, and up-start currencies have only really been possible since the advent of the Internet. Economists have never really had a chance to study a currency growing from $0 value in real time as they have had with BitCoin.

> All currencies are going to start off at $0, being worth nothing.

Recent counterexample: The Euro started off at about $0.80. From the moment it came online, it had some intrinsic value because of its status as legal tender in the eurozone. That meant that it was essentially guaranteed that from moment zero, there was some non-zero rate at which people with dollars were willing to trade them for euros.

The only currencies that one should expect to start off at $0 are completely un-backed ones such as cryptocurriences.

Right. That's what I mean. I'm talking about start-up currencies here; the EU could offer its currency higher than $0 because it was putting its own credibility behind it. But that's the only because people agreed to buy it at $0.80. There's nothing intrinsic about the Euro that makes it worth more than $0; everything about the Euro that's valuable is extrinsic to it.

If you create a currency from scratch, and you are not a representative of some country or corporation, it's only ever going to be worth $0 at the beginning. But in both cases it's the people who buy it who decide what it's worth.

> There's nothing intrinsic about the Euro that makes it worth more than $0; everything about the Euro that's valuable is extrinsic to it.

I suppose this is just quibbling about minor details, but what the hey. The euro is, by definition, the official currency and legal tender of the eurozone. If we're going to count the essential characteristics of what something is as extrinsics, then we've wandered off into some epistemological bizarro-world where you can probably get away with whatever you want about anything.

Right - I count being the official money of the eurozone as an extrinsic quality, not an intrinsic one. Fiat money is intrinsically worthless, just like BitCoin. Unlike gold which has utility in that its market value isn't just based on its speculative value, but also what it's used for - a lot of things like electronics and jewelry that make it so that demand for gold will always be non-zero - fiat money is just paper, at the very most, and at the very least just bits being willed into existence by a central bank that may or may not later be printed into paper money.

Its officialness gives it two extrinsic qualities: 1) It can be used to pay taxes in some countries and 2) It is unlikely to be outlawed.

To me 1) is not special. In my view this just means there will always be at least one vendor that accepts the US Dollar (the US government) and while that's a nice guarantee, it makes the dollar different only in degree, but not kind, from BitCoin.

2) is slightly more interesting because it means that while Bitoin may be outlawed, the dollar will most likely never be outlawed, and the current regulatory framework governing money transfers, financial reporting, etc. is likely to stay consistent.

I believe BitCoin will be regulated more heavily, but not altogether more heavily than the dollar, but it will be not outlawed. Thus I think BitCoin in the end will not be meaningfully different from other fiat money, but it will offer things that fiat money can't offer, like unlimited electronic transfers over the Internet at small cost.

Of course, like anything I don't know the future. Here's to hoping.

>All currencies are going to start off at $0, being worth nothing.

Bull. At this moment, I'm issuing an AqueousCoin to your pessimizer-account. In order to spend it, all you have to do is prove your identity by logging into HN in front of me or in front of a notary public, and I will send you $1 (minus postage.)

Done?

Sometimes (or possibly always by definition) the vendor comes before the currency.

Right, but it's not worth $1 until we actually engage in that transaction. Right now it's sitting in my pessimizer account worth exactly $0. I have no guarantee that you're going to pay me $1 for it until we actually engage in that exchange.

I suppose that's kind of an epistemic question. But to me, since how much someone buys something for is the central determinant of its price, it's not worth that price until someone buys it for it. So, perhaps it isn't even $0. The price of my AqueousCoin is (undefined)

I don't see why new currencies should start at $0. Think of AWS and getting a "100 EC2 m1.large instance hours" only instead of a single voucher you get 100 amcoinz.

> All currencies are going to start off at $0, being worth nothing.

That's far from guaranteed.

Gold started off as a commodity, worth much more than nothing. It ended up being a means of exchange because its properties are suitable: it's highly valuable, easily divisible and durable, and other stuff I forget now. But those are the reasons it started being used as money.

In fact, it's possible that nothing that will be widely used as a currency in the future will start off at zero value.

Planet Money has a great episode on why gold: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/02/07/131363098/the-tues...

This. Currencies function well when they grow in-line with the growth in the economies they serve. When they fail to do so, people become reticent to actually use them in commerce, which increases hoarding, increasing theoretical value, but reducing actual utility.

could you please point me to any theories or papers that discuss this? (genuinely curious)

There are some citations in the Disadvantages Section of the Gold Standard article on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard#Disadvantages

Read up on the theory around liquidity traps. It's not a popular idea among certain schools of economists, but it is a pretty mainstream idea.

It's one reason given for moving off the gold standard, and may even have been the actual reason for some to support that. The primary reason, however, was for governments to take control of the money supply and use it for political goals. Inflation is less visible than taxation.

Bitcoin may be deflationary, but can you really say crypto-currencies as a group are deflationary?

Cryptsy, for example, makes a market in more than 70 crypto-currencies [0]. If there's a low barrier to creating new currencies, then is the supply really limited?

[0] https://www.cryptsy.com/

Exactly, crypt-currencies as a whole are inflationary. There's even a site now to create your own -- coingen.io.

And it's not too hard to picture intermediaries, like bitpay and coinbase, to support many of the alternative currencies... helping adoption immediately.

At the risk of oversimplifying the issue: perhaps people should focus less on making enormous amounts of money mining and more on, you know, using the fucking currency.

Currencies typically aren't mined. If a currency can be generated out of thin air indefinitely that is usually a problem. You can actually "mine" paper dollars as well: it's called counterfeiting. In all countries the act of counterfeiting is unfair, leads to inflation and is almost always illegal.

The fact that the mining is tapering off for bitcoin isn't a problem. It's actually a feature that is designed to mitigate uncontrolled inflation.

The TRUE problem with bitcoin is that the nature of the coins themselves are changed by the way people perceive the coins. If people treat the coins as currency then thats what it becomes, but if people treat it as a speculative investment asset similar to a stock share then that's what bitcoin will become as well.

Right now nobody buys bitcoins to use as a currency. I can assure you 99% of bitcoin transactions occur because people are gambling on the fact that the price will go up and not because you want to use the coins as you use a dollar bill. Currently, bitcoin is much more a speculative investment asset then it is a currency. It is exactly like the stock market: A market where people bid on worthless paper for the sole purpose of selling the paper for profit.

In short the main problem with bitcoin is YOU and ME. As users of bitcoin the way we perceive and use the currency will change what it will become.

>You can actually "mine" paper dollars as well: it's called counterfeiting.

The counterpart to mining coins would be to invest dollars and "mine" interests.

That is not mining. Mining dollars happens when when banks engage in fractional reserve banking, lending out money that is simultaneously "in" a depositor's account.

But that doesn't create money, so much as temporarily creates an illusion of more money existing, hoping that there will not be a bank run to withdraw all of it. With non-reserve banking, when gold is passed around as money (possibly with seignorage), it is mined by digging in dirt.

counterfeiting is a closer counterpart in my opinion as interest is capped by the amount of money you have while mining is only capped by time and porcessing power. Anyway, all the money generated from the Fed, loans and interest is complicated to think about. I thought it was simpler to illustrate the whole thing with "printing money." Most people can perceive the bad part of counterfeiting and relate that to excessive mining, which is basically the point I was trying to convey.

A cynic like me thinks that's part of the point of bitcoin. Make it easy at the start to encourage adopters ("mine now and you'll have a big piece of the pie"), and later adopters will pay you back when it gets popular.

MLM 101. The top of the pyramid make the big money, everyone else gets played.

Then every successful startup out there is an MLM scheme.

The problem is that you also need to ensure that it isn't easily replaceable. Which bitcoin is.

Make access to the chain important for other reasons, and it stops being replaceable.

Satoshi controls about 14% of all BTC, and 7% of all BTC that will ever exist.

Right, but that only encourages hoarding.

Richest Dogecoin Owners http://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-dogecoin-addresses....

Related to this concept of moving to some other currency:

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/12/how...

Could you please explain what you found so insightful about that? No one else seems to have been convinced it has a relevant point -- the comments section and references to it on the internet.

Did I write that I found it "so insightful"?

I found it relevant.

What are you talking about? The average person may not be able to solo mine a block but you can still earn meaningful quantities through pools.

Not for bitcoin you can't. Not really, anymore. The rise of ASICs has marginalized everyone but the ASIC producers. They will always have the edge going forward. Even if they rent you the equipment, you are sharecropping and paying them enough that your sole profit will be from an increase in the value of the currency, not in acquiring coins at the current rate. You may as well just buy the bitcoins. I'm still not sure if this is to the net benefit of the currency or not; I don't think anyone is, people argue both sides, but I tend to think it's a bit premature since productive mining will proceed for years to come at the hands of only a few.

One of the potential benefits of the scrypt algorithm used by Litecoin and Dogecoin (and others) is that even with scrypt ASICs being developed, the memory-intensive nature of the algorithm has so far prohibited a massive disparity in hashing ability. You can still buy a sub-$2000 mining rig that will basically pay for itself in a couple months.

>You can still buy a sub-$2000 mining rig that will basically pay for itself in a couple month

No you absolutely can't. About 6 or 8 or so weeks ago I was making about $4 a day mining scrypt coins. Now I'm making $1.50. I don't think it is going to be profitable 6 weeks from now. When Dogecoin first exploded I had several $15-$24 days. Right after I first started there was actually a graphics card shortage(!) because of the interest in mining.

My graphics cards haven't been paid off yet with just mining, and I don't think they will be. That's not a problem for me, because I can sell one of them, and keep the other, which will pay them off.

If you don't already have the PSU, CPU, MOBO, etc, you are wasting your money building a mining rig, especially now the profits are so low. Only buy a graphics card if you want the card for other reasons. Those mining profit calculators way way way overestimate.

EDIT: My system has 600 kH/s hashrate.

EDIT EDIT: Even 6 or 8 or so some people on the litecoin mining subreddit were very confused about people who were building expensive mining rigs and pointing out how those rigs will never pay for themselves.

You need to change what you mine to whatever is most profitable. If you only target a single, popular one then yes, difficulty will increase and profitability will probably decrease. See http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency/

Hahahaha. Yeah. And I do, which is why I said cyptocurrency not a single one. Those profitability calculators are a joke, each one has a completely different ordering. My point was profit is going down for all coins everywhere, there is no secret magic to get back the profits I had 8 weeks ago, and with the exception of doge just around Christmas, the trend is continuing downwards for every coin.

altcoins cannot be forever profitable as basic economics tells us this.

As long as there is profit to be made people will join, until there is no more profit to be made.

Pretty simple economics but kind of scary for a system which is based around mining.

Well, perhaps I should have rephrased - I know you can still earn bitcoin, but you can earn more <newcryptocurrency>. So why not switch?

The answer would be "because bitcoin is legitimate and dogecoin isn't" - but I'd argue that bitcoin hasn't gotten there yet. So it's a race, and one that any cryptocurrency is likely to lose.

How do you define meaningful?

For a single novice user this would be the cost of hardware (substantial), opportunity cost from delays in delivery of hardware, decaying returns with exponential increase in difficulty, cost of electricity and opportunity cost.

Then it needs to be ascertained if they are mining a commodity or an investment. That is mining to sell (similar to farming and mining minerals, metals etc.) or are they looking to hold it for long periods expecting an appreciation. The later has other practical implications.

For the majority of prospective miners, these costs are huge and have little to no chance of breaking even.

Arguments could be made for or against the profitability from speculation/long term holding, but that is beyond the scope of most people's definition of meaningful.

Yes, please dissuade others from mining. It makes it more profitable for those of us who are already doing it ;)

But you'll never be able to earn as much as the average person who happened to start mining a month before you. The people who started first will always have an advantage over you. It all looks a bit like a pyramid scheme.

Please look up the meaning of pyramid scheme. Whatever crypto-currencies end up being, they are not pyramid schemes.

The reason why I think it's hot: because the cost-of-stake to purchase it is orders of magnitude cheaper than ltc or btc.

I worked out that if 1 million coins were allocated to all 3 chain for their total coin target, $1000 would buy about 0.06 bitcoins, 0.59 litecoins and 5.55 doge. Or 1 million divided into each chains' coins already in existence: 0.10 vs 1.97 vs 15.83 respectively.

So with doge, you get more bang for your buck, a larger slice of the pie for each $ spent. And a huge sub-reddit to launch into, and a clean piece of cyberspace to work with.

That's pretty compelling to me just on its own. And the coin I feel is sovereign to bitcoin. Also, when you see kids drawing pictures of shibes, and women stripping naked for them (there's a subreddit for it,) you know you're onto something unique.

The larger population need and want cryptos to work. Doge answers that need better than anything else right now. That's very important and should not be overlooked.

Errr... you just said that $1000 buys you .10, 1.97 and 15.83 (those numbers don't even make sense anyhow), which means that .10 bitcoins equals 15.83 dogecoins in value.

So what difference does that make... I can still spend 0.0001 bitcoins or 0.01583 dogecoins which would each equal a $1 in value. There's no difference in "cost-of-stake" at all.

Why do people have such trouble understanding fractions?

3 cakes with a million slices each. $1000 buys you 0.1 of a bitcoin slice, 1.97 litecoin slices and 15.83 doge slices.

(that's according to a cake composed of the current # of coins in existence for each cake, not the target amount)

So each piece of your cake costs $1000, but each piece takes out a different proportion from the whole cake (ie a certain number of slices per piece.)

The thing to think about is that buying coins, building an app and launching into a reddit, would likely be better than buying a mining rig to mine. Even a single app will inspire other developers to do the same and both will increase the value of one's coins (ie the size of your piece grows, as does the cake.) It's like IPO'ing your app on release, it's your coin value that goes up. And that's hot.

The cake value is determined by the richness of apps that are its ingredients - and the number of people that are circling it wanting a slice. At the moment, doge has few apps but many people circling it wanting the cake to grow. If you build an app that's any good, you've got immediate traction, and if you hold doge, that value will grow too.

(just my theory anyway)

But each slice of pie is infinitely divisible, or nearly so, so it makes no difference.

At the end of the day, the currency will hold some amount of economic value. For bitcoin at the moment, it's about $10 Billion USD. The total gross world product (GWP) is currently the equivalent of about $70 Trillion USD. So lets imagine a single crypto currency holding the entire GWP.

For bitcoin, that's $70 Trillion / 21 Million bitcoins = $3,333,333 per bitcoin. For dogecoin that's $70 Trillion / 100,000,000,000 dogecoin = $700 per dogecoin.

Both Bitcoin and Dogecoin are divisible to at least 8 decimal places (and the algorithms can change to permit greater divisibility), so your unit of currency is basically arbitrary. You can still spend $1 worth of a $3,333,333 bitcoin just as you can with dogecoin.

Dogecoin is just shifiting the decimal places around. It doesn't give you any different stake versus Bitcoin.

Ahh yes, I see your point, it comes down to what cake you think will grow faster in terms of what you will buy into.

But working out what you will build into, there are different things to think about, such as potential users and their desires, and what exists currently to meet those desires. Steve Jobs was about building things people didn't know they even wanted, and that'd be something to think about with a doge app. Even messaging.. all these tips going through, they are all potential relationships and followups. How can you track who you've sent to? How easy is it for reddit users to interact with each other outside of reddit?

Can a social network be built around tipping? Maybe a user might want to bookmark someone for a tip, rather than doing it instantly, or do it off public record. So basically attaching a username to a set of addresses, which can be generated on demand. Collecting feedback and ratings between users. It should be semi-anonymous.

> Ahh yes, I see your point, it comes down to what cake you think will grow faster in terms of what you will buy into.

Yup, I agree with you there. The problem is that there's nothing inherently different about Dogecoin that ensures a faster growth rate than Bitcoin. Bitcoin also has a subreddit, and I would argue a more mature community, even though it may not be the new hotness.

What is different about Dogecoin, it's faster block confirmation, it's faster difficulty retargeting, and it's larger reward payout, actually make it inherently less secure than Bitcoin (Litecoin shares these traits, to a lesser degree). The reason it's seeing faster growth compared to Bitcoin at the moment is that mining is still somewhat reasonable with regular hardware, but this will change fairly soon and slow it's growth rate as miners jump on the next currency that offers faster payouts.

So why not build your social network for tipping around Bitcoin? Personally I'd prefer a Bitcoin tip of 0.002 rather than 1000 Dogecoin.

A few good apps would cement the doge position. Its reddit growth is massive. I have ideas for a social network in fact, with screenshots. But I shelved them, but I have thought it through. Soundcloud tipping is something I personally would like to see (I think it has massive potential,) some way to see what artists have attracted the most tips, an easy way for artists to leave their tipping address which is not a blockchain address, or a link from each track that uses the referral to work out what track is being tipped (which the tipper confirms as correct) and generating an address on-the-fly.

[same with youtube, that is also a huge area of tipping. Who wouldn't leave a single url in all their tracks and videos if they receive tips from it, especially if the giver is recorded and the initiating media identified?]

Point-of-sale is also underdeveloped.

Doge in particular has no property apart from the name and the hype around the meme.

There are more than 200 alt coins [1] and the vast majority of these don't contribute anything new to the field of crypto currencies but many succeed to win followers just because people keep calling the process that should be called "policing with a small compensation" "mining for profit". Read Satoshi's whitepaper[2]. Mining is meant to not be profitable for the masses and yet it is profitable in so many cases. Why is this? Because people are confused about the value of the minable goods. Mining is always connected with an up-front investment and the bigger the industry the more professional you have to be to do it profitably. Therefore loosers/scammers/lunatics/pump-and-dumpers (sorry) gravitate towards unprofessional coins where there is no professionalism celebrating the next big thing since bitcoin and once their coin of choice turns more mature they abandon ship as the very property they seek – easy minability – got lost.

Disclaimer: I own bitcoins and was sent 100 reddit-dogetipbot-dogecoins.

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134179.msg4701768 [2] http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

>Doge in particular has no property apart from the name and the hype around the meme.

I think you're neglecting the value of the community. Dogecoin is, from a technical standpoint, just Bitcoin with some cosmetic changes, but the users make it much easier to get help and get involved. They're also more willing to give people dogecoin tips, which encourages spread.

My impression is that it's more similar to Litecoin in a technical sense since it is based on scrypt rather than sha256.

It is Litecoin with the font changed to Comic Sans.

Probably this week's best internet cryptocurrency.

Whether you think Doge is funny-money or not (I think it is), the thing I like about it is that it's changing hands (even if it's just for tipping people for making funny comments) and not really being hoarded for value.

At least not yet. Hopefully not ever.

From the article:

> This week, transactions worth a total of $US14 million were made, including one Chinese investor who bought $US5 million worth of the virtual currency

Maybe a casual usage currency would compliment the more serious (and polarizing) BTC or LTC. There were comedy coins before though, I suppose the meme is the only reason Doge has taken off.

Exactly. Relevant xkcd illustrating the phenomenon: http://xkcd.com/1102/

There's never been a coin that's been adopted anywhere nearly as quickly (which isn't to say it won't happen again, but it's definitely unusually successful).

I just laughed out loud. Thanks!

Despite DOGE mining difficulty shooting up this week it's still one of the most profitable coins to mine thanks to its spike in value. I've been making $60+ per day mining it. Now if I only had 10x as much hardware...

Are these realized gains? If so, how do you turn it into dollars? Do you go via BTC, or is there some direct exchange to US dollars now?

It's very funny to me how dogecoin has taken off. :-) I got tipped on reddit and now I'm hooked.

I think the seamless nature of tipping on reddit (all you have to do is reply to a comment with +/u/dogecoinbot n and it will send coins) has really spurred its use.

Btw, now that I have a dogecoin wallet (DRVMiXCneJhFVBy4r4T2zpw9j5f4Tp1KzH), anyone want to send me some...? :-D

I use Cryptsy to exchange for BTC. I cash out to USD when I have around 1 BTC. So no, not realized yet and subject to volatility.

+/u/dogetipbot 10 doge

there you go.

edited to add (and bring back on topic): this might look spammy, and in fact it is -- some subreddits don't like all the tipping noise at all, but on /r/dogecoin it's the big thing that differentiates it from the other altcoins.

There was bitcointip way before dogecoin was even a thing.

Wow! You make 30k/day? At this difficulty? You must have some serious hardware there, don't be sad. (mining around 1k/day with a HD 6950)

What hardware are you currently running?

Seven 290x video cards between two systems. They're running lower than peak output due to not having enough power (nearly maxing a 20A breaker). Here's my custom dashboard I wrote to monitor it: http://driverdan.com:3000/

>I've been making $60+ per day mining it. //

So is that "I've been grossing $60+ per day mining it."?

Also, you've converted that value from doge to bitcoin? Any idea what your costs are (hardware + running)?

Yes, gross. Power is roughly 10% overhead. Exchange fees are something like 2%. Those are my only monetary costs right now.

I go DOGE -> BTC -> USD.

Are you part of a pool or flying solo?

Pool (multipool). My hash rate isn't high enough to solo mine doge.

Huh???

How do you use Cryptsy and multipool at the same time? multipool converts to BTC automatically and only pays out in BTC. multipool also doesn't mine Dogecoin all the time, just the most profitable coin, and keeps which coin it is mining a secret from the user.

Your story doesn't add up.

EDIT: Hashcows is similar to multipool except it tells the user what it mines, has a slightly lower fee, and allows users to keep the alt coins or auto convert directly to BTC. It hasn't mined DOGE lately, here's what it is mining.

https://hashco.ws/stats/

Close but not quite. Yes multipool auto switches between coins. It has been doing mostly DOGE lately since it has been the most profitable. It tells you what you're mining, it isn't hidden. And no, it doesn't convert to BTC automatically. You get whatever you mine.

I did get multipool and middlecoin mixed up. My mistake. I was mining doge directly for a while but I quit to mine litecoin two weeks ago or so because that was much more profitable. I was actually making much more money mining litecoin rather than dogecoin. That might have changed because I heard the exchange rate went up a couple days ago. After mining litecoin for a week and having the best luck with that I moved back to a profit switching pool, hashcows, to see if they will be more profitable, even though they had a sql injection attack lately. I wanted to see which was going to do the best for me. I haven't even been home to change my miners even if doge is more profitable right now and I have to go on travel. So far litecoin and hashcows are about the same in profitability for me as of lately.

Some multipools convert automatically to BTC, and some don't. Middlecoin, for example automatically converts your earnings to BTC.

I think you're mistaking multipool for middlecoin. The latter is what you described. Multipool gives you the coins directly and shows tons of data of your/the pool's mining status.

Seven R290x doing on average 5.89MH/s is not enough to solo mine doge?

No. I would only hit a block about once a week, maybe less now.

I'm thinking this will be the first viable micropayments platform which is very exciting.

It seems like that would open up a ton of new opportunities but for the life of me, I can't think of any good uses for micropayments (beyond paying for content). Any ideas, HN?

Well, it seems there's a lot of people who believe WebGL, HTML5 and asm.js will once again make the web a serious challenger to the App Store in the casual games category in coming years. But there's still the problem of monetization when there's no easy micropayment system similar to the in-app-purchase systems that iOS and Android have. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out. I'm also pretty sure that Stripe is gunning for the "micropayments on the web made easy"-crown - their integration with e.g. the Humble Indie Bundle is already pretty slick.

I'm not sure that there are any opportunities for micropayments. It seems like a solution looking for a problem.

Spam elimination. It's true that mail clients and servers are pretty good at removing spam from our mailboxes these days, but there's still all the busywork that they're doing to send and receive stuff that ultimately never gets seen. A micropayment messaging service could greatly reduce the amount of spam that is actually sent, while allowing through messages that the sender is willing to pay servers to process.

Doing this via a global blockchain might not be viable, of course.

http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt :)

    (✓) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
    (✓) Huge existing software investment in SMTP

Also

   (✓) Sending email should be free

You can still send it for free, but if you want me to read it you'll have to pay! ;)

Actually, if the amount is a flat or mostly-flat rate then most e-mail exchanges would be effectively free (send message, get response, net cost = 0). I'm not sure how it would work with mailing lists/groups though...

Times change. New forms of currency are common now. SMTP is extensible. DomainKeys hapened.

The thing that bothers me is that US mail already costs 50 cents and I still get a ton of spam. 90%? So I'm wondering how viable it really is.

Because it's physical, I think you give it more weight (so to speak). I doubt you average more than five or ten pieces of physical junk mail per day, but it's not uncommon to receive hundreds of spam messages a day, or more, most of which is blocked at the server level, and most of the rest of which is blocked by your client filters. I've had my email address for about 15 years, and there are thousands of attempts per day to send to it that my email server blocks, and then when gmail picks up my mail it cuts out promotional and social stuff, as well as whatever it think is spam, and I end up seeing 5-10 messages a day total (including mail I want to see; email is not a major channel for me outside of work any more...).

Further, that physical spam is really, really well targeted compared to email spam. You may not care about most of it, but at least it has something to do with your real life (mostly coupons and advertisements for local businesses, if yours is like mine).

A lot of business mailings (at least that's the kind of stuff I consider "spam") get much cheaper rates than run of the mill residential letters, thanks to good ol' regulatory complexity. Ex: http://stateimpact.npr.org/new-hampshire/2011/09/27/how-junk...

But why would I pay money to send a non-email when people have been trained for years to check their actual email? I'd be paying more for something worth less to me.

Tips for good stack overflow answers maybe?

I would totally implement that, but I'm worried it would offend Stack Overflow users. (They seem to be offended easily. Probably by half the questions asked :-)

It's probably as simple as repurposing the reddit tip bot. I think it's open source, no?

Please, go ahead. Few people would complain about getting money tips, even if it is funny money. It will just add to the game.

User and feature requests with an associated tip, and a way to follow-up that tip or request later, by either the sender or receiver.

So a user tips a dev for a project, and leaves a comment and/or feature request. Weeks later, the dev can see who has left the most tips, and/or when a person tips they can select from a bunch of feature requests or make a comment.

So expanding on a comment I left in another part of this thread, the site would be called "follow up tip" and users connect their soundcloud, youtube, github and other accounts. They leave a tip url on tracks, videos or projects: http://followuptip.com/tipme/myusername

On that page, the site determines who the giver is (they're signed in,) what the tip is about (the site connects the referring url to an underlying project or media.. or the user will manually select it from those imported upon signup (and updated/synced regularly)) and an address is generated on-the-fly, which is tracked for some payment (and can be auto-forwarded.)

On the other hand, a person may not tip at all to that address (it's optional), but leave some message instead for a feature request or idea and then some bounty amount. The artist or developer then uses these requests to determine what to create/develop next, and they follow it up to all relevant tippers or requesters upon release/creation. "I've just released that feature" to which a tip can then be made against. Or, an artist (or video producer) can offer special release tracks first or the highest-quality downloads to their largest tippers who they message on a new track release. Or t-shirts or some exclusive merchandise can be provided for those who give over a certain amount.

The problem with blockchain addresses is there is no identity or username attached, and that's one thing the reddit tipbot overcomes and has thus made it popular (it's also publically visible too); and there's no efficient way to do followup (which this idea aims to solve.) A tipper may be happy to tip again, as well as buy some product (ie become a customer,) or send some link to friends when released. (if these friends also make tips, then the send user can earn referral points)

Perhaps there could be a way to create a specific tip page with a certain yt, soundcloud, or github song/vid/project embedded that can be tweeted out or sent to people, and if a person wants to leave a tip, a blockchain address is generated on-the-fly for them. There could be browser plugin that generates a short-url for any page on aforementioned sites: a page with the song/vid/project already embedded for tipping.

Any tip received can have a commission taken by followuptip before depositing into site account or else forwarding.

Our PM is really into crypto-currencies and when we talk about dogecoins it always makes me smile and feel better. I don't own any dogecoin yet but they surely make me healthier and more productive!

It would be pretty funny if dogecoin became a serious currency that one might use to buy property with for example, but is there any reason it has less chance than bitcoin?

> but is there any reason it has less chance than bitcoin?

I suspect serious (TM) business people would less like to associate with a currency based on an internet meme. At least, until its origins are inevitably buried from the public consciousness.

I guess it remains to be seen which happens first: there is sufficient infrastructure to deal in realty with cryptocurrencies, or we've forgotten that its foundation is people captioning dog pictures.

MtGox started as a Magic the gathering card exchange. While it's caused some snark, it didn't seem to get in the way of MtGox being the premiere BTC exchange for a while.

That's hardly a 1-to-1 comparison. For starters there are a number of large, legitimate businesses that make their money selling MtG cards on the secondary market. Secondly, didn't the folks at mtgox just use the domain name because they already owned it? AFAIK, the mtgox exchange bitcoin didn't grow out of the mtg exchange, it just happened to share a domain name.

> I suspect serious (TM) business people would less like to associate with a currency based on an internet meme

You sure? http://www.forbes.com/sites/dalebuss/2014/01/21/how-many-spo...

Really? I suspect that someone said this about the first companies to use lighthearted branding. Look at McDonald's. Using a goofy image to win over consumers has been a thing for at least 100 years. SRSBSNS-people could really care less if it helps them make money. That being said, DOGE likely has some technical problems that will crop up in about a year.

Your point about the mascot is something I had not thought about. I mean there are plenty of logos that are pretty silly (Geico Gecko for one).

Opposed to BitCoin, the crypto currency with an anonymous founder who holds a large percentage of the currency (and thus can crash it at any time) and whose rise to popularity piggybacked on the drug trade?

I don't think business people care whatsoever--if they think it will make money they will try and make that money.

The name is not part of the protocol. People can call them decoins.

One reason might be there is less technical know-how behind the developers compared to Bitcoin, or so I've read.

What's the easiest way to buy Dogecoin with USD or BTC? An exchange that doesn't require a drivers license and wait period?

What worked for me was Paypal USD on Reddit's /r/dogemarket - there are quite a few sellers there, and they're verified good sellers. Took about 10 minutes between posting on thread and getting coins. BTC would take a bit longer just due to verification times.

Be careful with that - increasingly, even verified accounts can't be trusted as they sell their accounts/get their accounts hacked.

You can trade BTC for DOGE at cryptsy.com, vircurex.com and bter.com

I use CoinedUp.

They are slow as hell, but free and very easy.

Transfer BTC to CoinedUp wallet -> convert BTC to DOGE -> Transfer DOGE to personal wallet.

Buy some bitcoins on your favorite exchange and send them to bter.com

Plenty of them for sale on eBay.

Will HN ever integrate Doge tips?

I want a HN without voting, but only tipping.

I was actually playing around with this idea. You think it would get used?

I'm also slightly torn on whether each upvote should just be equivalent to like $.01 in doge or let people tip whatever they want.

I have a good idea of how to make it happen just not sure it is worth spending time on.

One of the interesting early Bitcoin websites was basically that: a micropayment Reddit called Witcoin https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Witcoin

I used it for a bit. It was actually fairly nice, but it never picked up much traction and was shut down years ago.

I think we should. What would it take? I think it can be done by a third party, no? It wouldn't require any changes on the HN code.

Doable in a browser extension, possibly

With a browser extension you can integrate crypto tipping into every website. (Did i just missed my chance to create a startup? Investors, anyone? :)

With a browser extension you could intercept actual HN upvotes. The tricky part is the feedback, since that's one of the most valued and also despised parts of a tipping system. Some people really like to see how much others tip, and others hate the "noise".

It could be that only those who have installed the extension would see how much others are tipping (via discrete text appended somewhere near username).

don't forget about the onboarding process. if user A tips user B some doge, how do you notify user B and get their wallet set up? you either a) have to assume user B will notice and reach out pro-actively (unlikely) or b) have to have a way to contact user B. on HN, the best avenue is likely to assume their HN handle is the same as their twitter handle, so you can send them an @ message on twitter. (and have a verification setup via having them put a token in their HN profile.) ad hoc testing shows that some non-trivial % of hn users this works. but it isn't enough for it to be a strong assumption, you'd need a plan B. also, if you build something where tips are not public (which likely would get the extension banned anyway from pg, since it would clutter up the comments) then you literally have no possible way for user B to get setup sans the twitter trick, since they won't see the tip either.

the other way to do it is to make it so you can only tip other users who have the plugin installed. but this kills off the network effects and i'd guess the thing would be DOA after it drops off the front page.

(yeah, I thought of this too a while ago but abandoned the idea :))

gfodor: I've thought of a clever, easy way to send the coins to new users that doesn't require a sign-up. But I still don't know how to notify new users, unless they've already installed the extension. Your idea of Twitter handles is a good hack, but as you point out, it misses a non-trivial number of users. Hmm...

PS: By the way, to viach, mrfussion, and gfodor: I've already got a backend system built using Tornado and ZeroMQ for a Bitcoin POS that could be adapted to this scenario fairly easily, and it would scale well. But how to notify new users without pissing everyone else off....

My philosophy is that when you're giving people free money you shouldn't have to make much effort to notify them.

If people want the money let them come to you. If it's unclaimed after a year the policy could be that you'd donate it to charity. Which would keep with the spirit of tipping. (Or unclaimed funds could be divided between existing users each year, or returned.)

There are lots of things you could do.

Another interesting idea is to have a finders fee. So If an existing user helps track down the owner of an unclaimed account, they get a fee like 10%.

>> My philosophy is that when you're giving people free money you shouldn't have to make much effort to notify them.

Completely agree with that. It is enough to reply with "dogetip+1" for example, where "dogetip" is the bots website name.

>> easy way to send the coins to new users that doesn't require a sign-up

HN has "about me" field, right? What if user puts his wallet id there? We don't need him to sign up then.

I'd be up for working on that. I had the same idea a few weeks ago. Drop me a line if interested.

Checkout an idea I made above. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7119770 I'd be interested to help.

its a good ideea, but maybe it should be something on a site, installing an extension is not that easy and straight forward. like a tipping website (online wallet) , by username , or email

>> is not that easy and straight forward

It's as easy as clicking "install" i think. The extension itself is not complex to implement at all and it could be done in a week or so. The backend is a different story.

If HN is ever going to include a cryptocurrency tipping system (spoiler alert: it won't), why should it integrate Dogecoin?

Why not? PS. Spoilers break the intrigue.

I think the sense of community that’s there is the main reason for Dogecoin's popularity.

In the Bitcoin community, scams are rampant and those that are scammed never get their money back. In the Dogecoin community, there is exactly the opposite. I ran a website called EasyDoge (http://easydoge.com) that was designed as an online wallet service.

Unfortunately, it was hacked and quite a bit of money was stolen. I compensated everyone out of my own pocket for the losses. This isn’t a rare occurrence: the victims of two major hacks are being compensated by the SaveDogemas effort.

You seem like an honest and caring person, but your post does nor increase my confidence in dogecoin-- it is being propped up by generous donors?

So we need more than one distributed virtual currency? What property does this one have that is interesting beyond that?

Dogecoin can't be a real thing one day?

Those people probably said the same thing about a website called Mt. Gox: Magic The Gathering Online which went on to be the leader in BitCoin exchange.

no dogecoin celebration shall be complete without looking at the scary graphs

http://coinmarketcap.com/mineable.html

(I personally think it's a bubble but hey, it's growing while others falter)

Quite honestly, shameless self-promotion of this is getting really tiresome.

Is this seriously happening...

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