Hacker News Reader

Comment by master_shake | Hacker News Reader

yes my friend, you are misunderstanding the exchange rate. There are currently ~40 million "dogecoins" floating around the internet. All the dogecoins combined are presently worth $55 million USD. Therefore each dogecoin is worth $.0014 USD.

Before this announcement, there were only ever going to be 100 billion dogecoin in existence. Now they just decided that they want a 5 billion doge inflation rate per annum, Thereby decreasing the the value of each dogecoin.

Its somewhat similar to the way that the federal reserve pumps money into the market to increase the flow of capital, the dogecoin foundation wants to increase the flow of dogecoin by increasing the supply and access and decreasing the incentive to hoard.

edit the code was already written to be inflationary. The plan was to implement a 100 billion cap in some future version. They scrapped that plan.

View on HN

It's not so bad in theory, at least it counters the deflationary-currencies-are-evil-and-stupid argument. The real worry is that now some entity has been entrusted with the ability to manipulate the value of the currency, and that the entity may violate that trust by later deciding to further inflate the currency.

You would need a ~50% consensus (measured in compute power) to push through these manipulations though.

Never thought I'd find myself calling a distributed cryptocurrency surprisingly democractic...

Does anyone have a good explanation as to why this is supposed to be hard to achieve? What incentive do miners in the distant future have against inflating a cryptocurrency?

For example, take Bitcoin after the cap has been reached and mining bitcoins only gives fees. If 50% of miners cooperate to make blocks worth real bitcoins again, they will suddenly start raking in more profit. They will be devaluing everyone's stores of bitcoins to do it, but people who hold bitcoins have no say in it, only computing power does. If we assume that miners will be the main owners of bitcoins for all eternity then they will probably never agree to this, but if there are a lot of miners with very little in reserve then why wouldn't they accept devaluing bitcoins a little bit to get more per block mined?

Exchanges and other prominent users would probably also have to agree to the change. Things might get bad if there was a split between miners and everyone else because the miners could perform 51% attacks on the other fork, though.

Everything about DOGE seems like some bizarre social experiment.

The Jamaican bobsled team are going to the Olympics based on donations from a cryptocurrency based on a set of jokes centered around a picture of a dog from a blog.

There is a reason William Gibson stopped doing straight sci-fi.

My question is who spent $30,000 to buy all those DOGEcoins?

Many people. I personally threw $100 in because why not? Its a small amount of cash to lose. I am willing to bet more then 300 people have spent more then $100.

now some entity has been entrusted with the ability to manipulate the value of the currency

Not really; inflation is built into the code and getting everyone to "upgrade" would be difficult.

The inflation rate over time will actually tend to zero, since each additional 5bn coins represents a smaller proportion of the total amount. A constant quantity over time translates into a decreasing rate of inflation.

That's not accounting for lost coins (either because the wallet is lost or the owner is prevented from spending them).

The idea in the github thread seems to be that the 5% inflation should approximately cancel out the unknown loss of coins that would be going on.

That's also insufficient over the long term since coins are lost as a proportion of the total per unit of time.

This is important - anything that a majority of a cryptocurrencies userbase doesn't like won't get implemented because they wouldn't upgrade the protocol, they would fork it.

> There are currently ~40 million "dogecoins" floating around the internet.

I'm assuming you meant to say 40 billion.

You'll never get to the moon on millions of things.

Not with that attitude.

Or from that altitude.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com