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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

But it does have technical merit.

To repeat what I said yesterday:

   1. more coins for larger transactions instead of fractions
   2. faster block rate (one a minute)
   3. faster difficulty adjustment time (4 hours vs days or weeks)
   4. faster reward halving time  (every other month or so)
   5. faster time to last block (mid 2015)
   6. faster confirmations on transactions
   7. random rewards

So it's not just a meme-coin, it has advantages technically too.

Their blockchain size is going to bite them though next year if not later this year. It is going to be massive and the client needs to only download block headers for performance.

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Unless they have the developer and cryptographer attention bitcoin has looking for flaws, a bunch of technical changes like that is not an advantage, it's a likely flaw that may make the coin less secure.

Just because someone says this list of things make it better doesn't make it so, I seriously doubt the implications of those changes on security have received even a fraction of the attention bitcoin has received by those looking for attack vectors.

Indeed. In fact those changes are known to decrease security. Those aspects of bitcoin where chosen on purpose and for good reason.

People seem to make it out as though the bitcoin developers didn't know how to make faster confirmations or quicker difficulty adjustments, and that the dogecoin devs discovered how to do it better. The truth is that the dogecoin devs decided to lessen the security in order to make the currency more attractive on the surface, even thought it undermines the stability of the coin in the long run.

Arguably Bitcoin was a lot more conservative than it should've been in terms of stuff like the speed of confirmations, though, and in practice this has actually reduced security since all the popular payment services accept transactions with zero or one confirmations. With Bitcoin's sluggish design that's the only way to complete with the speed and convenience users are used to from services like credit cards and PayPal.

(If anyone here hasn't paid attention to the technical details of Bitcoin, the number of confirmations is a lot more important than the total amount of time taken on them. A lot of Bitcoin proponents tend to argue otherwise in order to encourage people to use it over newer alternatives, but they're fairly unambiguously wrong and even Satoshi's original white paper explaining Bitcoin makes this clear.)

> Their blockchain size is going to bite them though next year if not later this year. It is going to be massive and the client needs to only download block headers for performance.

Gee, who whould have thought maintaining a massively replicated transaction database over a huge number of globally distributed internet nodes would be a bad idea?

Seriously though, you're right, their block chain is going to balloon. At this rate they will probably overtake Bitcoin (which is approaching 14gb) before the year is out.

That's the problem with these blockchain systems, you have to find a delicate balance between things like max block size (max TPS rate), confirmation times, blockchain size, p2p network size, etc. Basically none of these coins really scale in any direction.

Dogecoin is just a Litecoin fork with shibas, comic sans, and joke settings like generating billions of coins and 1-minute blocks. It's not like they tuned anything for long term usage.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

Do you really think random rewards is a technical advantage? I can understand why you might (wrongly) think the other six are advantages, but ending on that note makes me think you're just trolling.

Wasn't trolling.

Random rewards prevents easily predictable behavior and forces people to group together to mine because a miner could work all day and produce one block worth 10 coins, or collaborate with 10 other people and produce 10 coins, some of which are worth a 100k coins, to average out the 10 coins.

It's more social engineering than technical engineering but still.

That explanation didn't make any sense at all. What do you mean group together? In a mining pool? That already exists with bitcoin.

Also, how is predictable behavior a bad thing? Perhaps the US mint should have super-mint months where they print 20 times as much currency as they usually do.

Over bitcoin maybe (along with some disadvantages). However,it doesn't have any technical merit over litecoin, or many of the other several dozen litecoin clones.

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