Comment by tlrobinson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tlrobinson | Hacker News Reader

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That's great, but I get the feeling Dogecoin users are even less informed about the technology than the average Bitcoin user. I wonder how many understand why Dogecoin in it's current state (like Bitcoin) can't scale to support widespread usage of micropayments?

There are two problems:

1. The protocol limits the maximum block size to 1MB (https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/blob/master-1.5/src/mai...) which puts Dogecoin's maximum transactions per second at 70, without a forking protocol change.

2. Dogecoin targets one minute between blocks, which is 10 times faster than Bitcoin's 10 minutes per block. That number wasn't chosen arbitrarily. There needs to be plenty of time for new blocks to flood the network, otherwise forks will become more common as miners work on outdated information. This leads to reduction in effective hashrate and increased centralization of miners. Increasing the maximum block size significantly will be at odds with Dogecoin's faster confirmations.

"... A configuration in which the vast majority of users sync lightweight clients to more powerful backbone nodes is capable of scaling to millions of users and tens of thousands of transactions per second.

[PayPal] handles around 4 million transactions per day for an average of 46 tps or a probably peak rate of 100 tps. "

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

When Dogecoin approaches Paypal's transactions per second an engineering solution will have to be found.

The community has already dealt successfully with one fork due to a bug. I'm sure the same thing can happen in the future if there are problems.

In many ways, Dogecoin is 'worse is better.'

You would call that successfully? The developers have no idea what they're doing. They copied bitcoins code, but didn't realize that they made a 500 million doge transaction limit, so they gave their users a short period of time to update their clients. They ended up with a fork after someone made a 500 million doge tx which could have allowed many many doublespends. Doge will not be able to scale up to real economic activity unless they get a real dev team.

> You would call that successfully?

There was a problem, and now it's not a problem. Seems like a success to me.

> The developers have no idea what they're doing.

Luckily, that doesn't actually matter. Frankly, if they knew what they were doing, Dogecoin probably wouldn't even exist in the first place.

> Doge will not be able to scale up to real economic activity unless they get a real dev team.

Last I checked, DOGE had a higher total transaction volume than all other cryptocurrencies put together, sooooooooo

I'm still very skeptical of Dogecoin's transaction volume. I ran some numbers last week and still haven't heard a decent explanation: https://www.quora.com/Dogecoin/Where-is-the-currently-massiv...

Do you think it could be fake - i.e. a bunch of bots trading back and forth to generate interest? If so, that's a very clever way of bootstrapping to critical-mass popularity. That reminds me of a story of a new york nightclub that pretended to be jam packed the first few nights with a bouncer outside telling everyone: "sorry, the place is full", when in fact, the place was empty. Needless to say, the first night it was actually open, hundreds were standing in line.

The /r/dogecoin subreddit has some _very_ active "tipbots." Many threads consist of people tipping each other back and forth. It's almost like a Potlatch. It's pretty ridiculous and fun and it's one of the reasons adoption among redditors has taken off.

Dogetipbot's creators say it's only exchanging about $1500 USD/day of DOGE, so that doesn't explain it.

>They copied bitcoins code

They copied the code to Litecoin. At least get your facts straight.

Just to clarify some of the facts.

Dogecoin uses scrypt like litecoin, but this proof of work was first used by Tenebrix. It also employs the random block reward (vs fixed for litecoin) pioneered by LotteryTickets (which includes the ongoing 10k block reward feature). I'm not exactly sure which repo it was started from, but the wallet client, namely the 1.5 release inherits all Litecoin updates since 0.6.*.

"Pioneered"? Is there any advantage to random rewards, besides novelty?

It makes mining more addictive, which increases the number of people who are willing to mine, even if the financial rewards for doing it drop. Same reason why people by lotto tickets even though it's a net economic negative.

I'd argue that the Dogecoin creators are actually quite brilliant, because they manage to exploit several known cognitive biases in humans to drive adoption. Design for the world as it actually is, not for how you would like it to be.

So, novelty.

It is an incentive to keep around gear that can't normally pay for its electricity. Mining gear that isn't online 24/7 but can come online when the need arises is useful to counter a temporary 51% attack.

Interesting point. So miners would stay online and only mine blocks that they know would be profitable to them?

Presumably there would be a lot of such miners, which would increase competition for those more profitable blocks, which would essentially dampen out the expected value of the rewards. I wonder how the math works out.

99% of dogecoins code originates from the Bitcoin project. The other 1% is Litecoins proof of work and other random garbage including 10k block rewards at the end (originally a bug they didn't want to fix), 1 year for all coins to be generated, random rewards, 500 million transaction limit (originally a bug that they fixed and due to incompetence caused a massive fork) the security and economic implications of which likely hasn't been considered AT ALL, yet people still argue that these arbitrary changes are genius.

The reason they argue that the changes are genius is because they either have been fooled by someone with a stake in dogecoin, or have a stake in dogecoin themselves.

To be fair, Bitcoin experienced a hard fork last year too.

That said, I agree Dogecoin's dev team talent is non-existent compared to Bitcoin's, but to some extent they can just copy everything Bitcoin/Litecoin does, for now.

I'm not sure it's a lack of talent but rather unfamiliarity with Litecoin/Dogecoin's code base.

Charles Lee and Sunny King, two very talented developers, both made similar mistakes when they started their coins. In Charles Lee's case, be had to scrap his first coin (Fairbrix) and start over with Litecoin.

3. The blockchain is going to be mind-boggling huge in just a few years, maybe terabytes by the end of the decade.

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