Well, Dogecoin is still a meme – just a more expensive meme. And as the price rises from the deep, the historically dispersed evolution of Dogecoin rises too.
Take, for example, Dogecoin lead supervisor Ross Nicoll. His last engagement with Github came in October 2019, but in the past two weeks he has taken on a handful of new pull requests to make changes to the coin.
When he and four other Dogecoin developers take over the keyboard in the name of Shiba Inu-minted memecoin (which is now valued at over $ 9 billion at $ 0.07 per coin), they need to update software, theirs last major version was almost two years old years ago in June 2019.
“People say it’s a joke, but we’re very careful with the code. When it started there was a resurgence in attention and we want to keep the currency working, ”Ross Nicoll told CoinDesk.
What is Dogecoin?
When Jackson helped create Palmer Dogecoin, he meant it as a joke, a mockery of the cryptocurrency space, which he didn’t take seriously. The memecoin was released on December 6, 2013 and was a junction of the Bitcoin code base that was used to optimize some of the key design features of Bitcoin.
For one thing, Dogecoin inflation is significantly higher than Bitcoin’s and the supply has not halved since 2014. Each block contains 10,000 DOGE, so around 5.2 billion DOGE are mined every year. Dogecoin’s mine difficulty adjustment (which controls how difficult or easy it is to find a block) adjusts every block, unlike Bitcoin, which adjusts every 2,016 blocks. It is sometimes “merged” with Litecoin, which means that miners run programs to mine both chains at the same time.
In addition, DOGE has faster bocks than Bitcoin (1 minute versus 10 minutes), so transactions are faster and cheaper than Bitcoin. This costs a lot more orphaned blocks than Bitcoin – blocks that are rejected by the network and do not add to the longest blockchain transaction history.
Dogecoin also includes a community-donated developer fund that currently holds DOGE worth just over $ 100,000. According to Nicoll, the developers share access to the fund through a multi-signature wallet.
Old doge, new tricks
One of the things that brought Nicoll and others back to DOGE was the “scaling issues” that the team discovered. Over the past month, Dogecoin ‘s full node count (the ones that run the Dogecoin source code and record the network’s transaction history) has grown from a few hundred to around 1,300, Nicoll said. Most Dogecoin nodes run with the default setting, which only allows outbound connections but no inbound connections.
Because Dogecoin node users don’t disable this firewall to allow inbound connections from peer nodes, the topography of the network is shaky, Nicoll explained. Hundreds of nodes have only a one-way connection to the rest of the network. Because they don’t connect to other nodes, some wallets have problems syncing.
Nicoll and his colleagues first deal with this problem. They also have their hands full catching up on the 7 major versions that Bitcoin Core has more or less stopped since Dogecoin’s development.
This is because the technical evolution of Dogecoin has been copied step by step from Bitcoin Core for many years, which means that the code has been copied for each new Bitcoin version and adapted for Dogecoin. Since March 2014[Dogecoin Core] has always been based on Bitcoin, ”Dogecoin developer Maximilian Keller told CoinDesk. This was a security decision that, according to Dogecoin, “contributed significantly to stability”.
“[The Bitcoin] The rebuilding has been extensively reviewed and tested, and since then we’ve used the knowledge gained there to post updates. Given that, I don’t see the latest version as a problem. It’s been stable and the rules of the network haven’t changed in a way that would put it at risk since then.
“The Dogecoin network doesn’t necessarily have the same challenges as Bitcoin, so it’s less of a pressing issue for us [to update regularly]”Said Keller.
The technical mimesis stopped a few years ago and now there is a gap in development between the last small Dogecoin release (v.1.14.2, which came out in November 2019) and the most recent activity. (For example, if you take a look at Dogecoin’s GitHub, you’ll see that all of the 20 most popular contributors are Bitcoin Core developers.)
So the Dogecoin development group of five is working on new versions, most notably Dogecoin version 1.21, which inherits aspects of Bitcoin Core 0.21 but still requires code redesign to fit into Dogecoin design, Nicoll said.
He went on to say that the best thing to do is to push the update within a year so it doesn’t “get to the point where Bitcoin Core is accelerating away from us”.
Is Dogecoin technically safe?
Nicoll and his compatriots are evolving at a time when Dogecoin is howling the moon, but would they turn their attention to it if porn stars, rappers, and the richest man in the world didn’t tweet about it?
“We will always prioritize safety. I won’t say that [development] won’t slow down again, but we’ll always be there to check for security issues to make sure the software is up to date, ”Nicoll said when asked if new DOGE owners were suspicious of Dogecoin’s spotty development should face.
Looking at the technical architecture of Dogecoin (which, to be clear, doesn’t have any gaping holes), the network’s hashrate is roughly 300 terahashes. To put this in perspective, Bitmain’s newest and most powerful miner produces over 50 terahashes at maximum power, and Bitcoin’s hash rate is roughly 161 exahashes (or 161,000,000 terahashes).
However, Dogecoin uses the Skrypt hashing algorithm instead of the Bitcoin SHA-256, which is said to be ASIC resistant. This means that most of the Dogecoin mining is done using computer processors (CPUs) or graphics cards (GPUs), which results in a lower hash, although ASICs may like the Antminer L3 + to run Skrypt.
It is theoretically very easy to attack 51% Dogecoin to defraud your network and print new coins (or steal coins from others). Some numbers on the back of the napkin, uncovered by CoinDesk, suggest that an attack on the Dogecoin network would cost about $ 8 million for a week.
Then why wasn’t it attacked? Maybe it’s because it’s really too much joke to be worth it. On the other hand, it may be because no one is low enough to attack a coin with a puppy’s face.
