18 ms·

Dogecoin decides to allow annual inflation of 5 billion coins each year, forever

206 points by ck2 13y ago

ck2 13y ago
"ummjackson" has appeared on HN before so perhaps they will comment here as to how dogecoin could ever exceed 1000 satoshi with this decision. That is several new coins for every active person on the internet, every year. Also, the blockchain might require terabytes after a decade. ps. if you do show up, please clarify if it is going to be a zero to 10k reward which is a different situation, or actually 10k fixed per block
- somewhatjustin 13y ago
  I don't see how they plan on keeping any sort of stable price with this inflation.
  - kybernetyk 13y ago
    My understanding was that Dogecoin doesn't want to become a "serious" currency and the sentiment in the community against the BTC-community is that they take themselves far too serious. This decision makes sense if Doge intends to stay the "great comment, I give you 10000 doge for that" fun-currency and drive out everybody whose primary intention is financial gain.
    - ck2 13y ago
      If that is the case the tipbots should not show USD next to the amount.
      - publicfig 13y ago
        At least in my opinion, that's part of the joke, showing such a small amount next to such a large amount of coins.
    - waterlesscloud 13y ago
      If the coin has no value, you might well just say "great comment, I give you 10000 doge for that" without the hassle of actually giving doge. Why have a whole system that accomplishes no more than merely typing the words did? Stick with the words. Easier, faster, just as much fun.
      - aestra 13y ago
        Kinda like how people used to say "+1 internets for you"?
      - sixothree 13y ago
        Or heck, you could have greasemonkey scripts that tie the upvote button to tips.
      - kybernetyk 13y ago
        > Easier, faster, just as much fun Easier? Yes. Faster? Yes. Just as much fun? I don't know. Psychologically a Doge has still more perceived worth than than karma. At least to me.
  - aw3c2 13y ago
    1 DOGE will be 1 DOGE for eternity. If that is not 100% stable then I don't know what is.
  - uniclaude 13y ago
    Are you assuming that fixed supply leads to price stability? If so, please expand.
- ceejayoz 13y ago
  > Also, the blockchain might require terabytes after a decade. Imagine saying "the blockchain might require gigabytes after a decade" in 2004. Here in 2014, you can get 64 GB on something the size of your smallest fingernail for $30-$40. Terabytes after a decade won't matter a bit.
  - kzrdude 13y ago
    You need a corresponding growth in bandwidth, too, otherwise transfer, sync, backup, restore, etc times will only grow.
    - ceejayoz 13y ago
      How much bandwidth did you have in 2004? I definitely didn't have 50/5 Mbps back then...
      - kzrdude 13y ago
        I did have 10MBps and a while before that 100MBps just because of the campus network. Today in a residential area I have 22MBps down, 16 up (measured). However, that result might actually be capped by my wifi. I should have 60-100 MBps. That said, I was thinking of it all, memory bus, disk r/w speed etc.
- doyoulikeworms 13y ago
  Fixed at 10k per block, says he: https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/issues/23#issuecomment-33893825 https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/issues/23#issuecomment-...
LoganCale 13y ago
This effectively killed my interest in the currency completely. I've stopped mining it. I suspect this may be what they want: to keep it basically worthless so people keep using it to tip people large amounts and have fun with it, and to drive away investors and people looking to profit.
- colanderman 13y ago
  to drive away investors and people looking to profit. Holy shit, you mean it's a currency that will encourage trading rather than hoarding? The horror!
  - ck2 13y ago
    Why would you trade it? You can just mine more as you need it? You aren't going to sell any goods for it because the value today is likely worth less tomorrow unless you can "cash it out" immediately.
    - colanderman 13y ago
      Why would you trade it? You can just mine more as you need it? Mining is resource-intensive. the value today is likely worth less tomorrow unless you can "cash it out" immediately. Exactly! Not only is this like almost every other good on the planet, it encourages trade.
      - ck2 13y ago
        In 2015 it won't be resource intensive. We should be on 3rd or 4th generation asic scrypt miners by then which maybe means you'll be able to get a $20 usb stick that makes you 10k coins a month with a single kilowatt of power per month.
        benmanns 13y ago
        But when everyone has a $20 USB stick capable of mining 10k coins a month on today's difficulty, that difficulty will go up dramatically. Mining will always be expensive to everyone but those with early access to next generation hardware.
mkr-hn 13y ago
What I like about doegcoin is that everyone realizes it's a joke and has fun with it.
- ck2 13y ago
  There are a great many people spending a whole lot on power and hardware who probably aren't laughing so much at the joke.
  - mkr-hn 13y ago
    This is a risk when you invest in something where a small number of people can fundamentally change it on a whim. Remember Zynga's warning about its dependence on Facebook in its IPO filing?
  - girvo 13y ago
    Well, that's their loss for taking a gamble on it. Not everything is a sure bet, and even those that look like it might turn out not to be :)
  - merloen 13y ago
    Oh, but we're laughing at them!
  - smtddr 13y ago
    That's because those people... ARE the joke! But seriously, Dogecoin was a way-out-there bet. You can't be upset if it doesn't work out. Also, I've seen enough "devastating-end-of-the-world" news on cryptos that make the price tank only to come right back up a month or 2 later. Maybe this'll be reversed after the price tanks & difficulty drops. I'm keeping my doge miners going... You never know. But I'm fully prepared to find out it was all for naught. Easier for me to say since I don't spend anything to mine them. My job gives me limited but free access to cloud servers.
colanderman 13y ago
Hm, kinda wish it was a percentage rather than a fixed amount. Eventually 5 billion will be but a small percentage of the total. Kudos nonetheless; glad there's finally a digi-coin that might sort of kind of be fungible for real-world wealth.
gus_massa 13y ago
Really, 5 billons appear to be a lot, but it will be only a 5% the fist year after the initial mining period is complete. And after 20 years the annual inflation will be only 2.5% if no doge is lost. [Disclaimer: I’m from Argentina, where a 5% annual inflation would be really nice.]
cocoflunchy 13y ago
Lots of good discussion on the reddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/1wsg31/dogecoin_will_not_be_capped_at_100_billion/ http://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/1wsg31/dogecoin_wi... I think this is good news overall.
girvo 13y ago
Man, I really feel like those who are upset about this truly wanted it to be "their Bitcoin" -- the cryptocurrency they got on the ground floor for and were hoping would turn out like BTC has. And to be fair, it sorted started looking that way. But now, as it's been decided to be "inflationary" (like the USD currently), they feel that the party is over. And I get it. That sucks. Personally, I think it's a great thing for Doge. It'll keep up the current "tipping culture", discourage hoarding, and encourage us doge to trade and share, til we get to the moon. Such wow. Amaze. :D
- ck2 13y ago
  Does "to the moon" mean $1 per coin? If so, how is dogecoin going to create five billion USD per year via coin buyers to pay for its inflation? Unless it means something else and I am missing the point?
  - girvo 13y ago
    Who cares! That's the point ;) Also, "to the moon" is a dogecoin reddit joke, it doesn't mean anything in particular
    - mkr-hn 13y ago
      Much like dogecoin and its relation to bitcoin, "to the moon" is a long-running thing that transcends any single Internet event. To the moon is simultaneously the moon and the path to the moon.
    - oafitupa 13y ago
      A dogecoin joke? Are you serious? Bitcoiners have been screaming to the moon for years. But now it's doge's joke? Is there anything else you want to copy without improvement?
      - officemonkey 13y ago
        Such wow. So animosity. Doge let Bitcoin have moon too. Many room.
saalweachter 13y ago
Oh god, they really are master trolls. The hilarious thing to note here is that -- over the short term -- this is barely different than Bitcoin's inflation rate. Bitcoin halves its inflation rate every 4 years, but 4 years is a long time in internet time. Here, let's lay them out side by side: INFLATION RATE BY YEAR YEAR BITCOIN DOGECOIN 1 inf% inf% 2 100% 100% 3 50% 50% 4 33.3% 33.3% 5 12.5% 25% 6 11.1% 20% 7 10% 16.6% 8 9.1% 14.3% So while there is an important distinction between Bitcoin's and Dogecoin's inflation rates (Bitcoin's money supply is convergent; Dogecoin's is divergent despite a monotonically decreasing inflation rate), 8 years after their respective epochs, Dogecoin's inflation rate will be 5.2% higher than Bitcoin's. The horrors! The horrors!
- ck2 13y ago
  Hmm. Interesting chart but could you explain how you are calculating inflation? Dogecoin reward halves every other month until mid 2015
  - saalweachter 13y ago
    Sorry; I was just working off the "5 billion coins a year" title. I am just taking the number of new coins created in a year, and dividing it by the number of coins already in the money supply. So if Bitcoin was creating X bitcoins per year for the first four years, the inflation rate for year four was X / 3X = 33%. In year 5, they halved the reward rate, so the inflation rate for year 5 was X/2 / 4X = 12.5%, and for year 6 it was X/2 / (4X + X/2) = 11.1%. If Dogecoin were minting a constant 5 billion coins per year, then the inflation rate is much simpler: it is always (100/N)%, which is the well-known harmonic series. Accounting for the initial money supply of 100 billion Dogecoins, it basically just starts further down the harmonic series, and Dogecoin's inflation rate would be 100/(20+X)%, which looks like 5%, 4.8%, 4.5%, 4.3%, 4.2%...
- ye 13y ago
  Oh, but you conveniently omitted what happens after. 10, 20, 50 years. The truly important difference is that Bitcoin has an absolute upper limit, but Doge doesn't anymore. It matters. Scarcity is an important factor for holding value. Bitcoin will eventually become deflationary, and sooner than you think due to loss of bitcoins.
hippich 13y ago
finally some major alt coin done this :) One of major complain about bitcoin is the fact of limited supply of coins. I.e. deflationary currency. But as you can see now - this is nothing more then just an agreement between people using bitcoin (or dogecoin) If majority of dogecoin owners will not like it - they will fork it. Otherwise we will have nice example of inflationary currency.
naughtysriram 13y ago
When will someone make a DOUCHECOIN?
doodyhead 13y ago
This is the one feature that will uniquely distinguish Dogecoin from other cryptocurrencies: - It makes the currency much more democratic -- missed the first few months of mining? jump in any time you like and still reap the benefits! - It neatly circumvents the issue of lost coins -- Bitcoins will keep dwindling over time and there will be no way to keep a consistent number of coins in circulation - Inflation puts to bed one of the major concerns raised by many traditional economists about Dogecoin; deflation does seem to encourage hoarding - As a corollary, inflation encourages spending, the growth engine of every modern economy. Like it or not, it works. I'm mining as much Dogecoin as a I can and will keep doing so. I think this is great news! To the moon!!
- ck2 13y ago
  I was trying to think of positives to this and the "democratic" concept is also something I hit upon, good point. I just kinda worry 5 Billion is too much. Maybe zero to 10k random would be better like the zero to million it started with.
- walden42 13y ago
  The free market takes care of all your points, except the first one, which isn't a big deal, really. - Lost coins? Analysis can make good estimations of how many coins are lost. The market price will adjust. - Yes, it puts down concerns from people who believe that inflation is necessary, that is true. Whether deflation is bad is another story, and again, the market takes care of it. If value of the currency goes up over time ("encouraging hoarding"), then the reverse also holds true: merchants lower pricing to encourage spending because they'd rather have bitcoins/litecoins/whatevercoins than the alternatives. - Same as above. The deflationary aspect has been discussed extensively already, so there's no need to go much further. Here are some nice responses: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/66/will-deflation-destroy-bitcoin http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/66/will-deflation... Now, as to whether this decision was good or bad, I think it's fairly neutral. If the currency was capped, then I'd say there wouldn't be much to distinguish it from litecoin or bitcoin. This just seems like a way to add a new-ish aspect to it. I'm all for experimenting with multiple currencies, multiple ways of doing things, and I'm interested in seeing what'll happen. Perhaps 10 billion dogecoin will eventually become irrelevant because its value will be too low (akin to spending a ton of resources to mine a few pennies). Or maybe not. I'm rooting for all cryptocurrencies in general nontheless.
deleted 13y ago
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lettergram 13y ago
If they can add inflation they can take it away... and on another note, inflation (or at least lack of deflation) will increase spending of that currency. In other words, it would help Dogecoins be used more, as opposed to hoarding like bitcoins.
- gwern 13y ago
  > If they can add inflation they can take it away... The longer a coin runs, the harder it gets. And if I'm reading this bug report correctly, it's not that they're 'adding inflation', it's that they're declining to change an erroneous setting and maintaining the status quo. The more clients that come out, the more that setting will get locked in...
  - michaelt 13y ago
    How are settings like this updated? Is it like the blockchain fork, where the settings are hardcoded into the client, so the longest chain uses whatever settings are in the client most popular with miners? For example, if someone with a lot of resources wanted to adjust the inflation settings for bitcoin, how would they go about it?
muyuu 13y ago
That was the original plan. Nothing has changed. It's a small constant creation that will converge towards 0% inflation over time, and will stabilize with coins lost and destroyed. Great idea IMO.
Glyptodon 13y ago
I'm surprised that there isn't a cryptocurrency that uses much more complex rules to determine the number of coins mined in each subsequent block. It seems like the blockchain could be used to evaluate the health of currency's ecosystem in a way similar to taking a look at the system monitor or result or cat/proc/loadavg on your desktop. Heck, the blockchain could even be used to store 'extra' system state information with every block, like current exchange rates with other currencies, which would then be used to determine the reward for the next block. I guess all I'm saying is that I'm surprised there's not a version of bitcoin with an algorithmic 'central bank' type of function, rather than a very straightforward 'inflationary' or 'deflationary' algorithm.
- philwelch 13y ago
  Milton Friedman was a monetarist, who believed that the ideal monetary policy was for the currency base to grow in time with real economic growth since this would result in neither inflation nor deflation of prices. If you could deduce economic growth from the blockchain you could make a Friedman coin.
  - judk 13y ago
    That would require destroying coins during a recession.
    - marvin 13y ago
      Bitcoin/Dogecoin is basically a public ledger. Couldn't the system be set up so that this system of rules did destroy coins during a recession by reducing everybody's balance? It could probably be gamed very easily by speculators going in and out of the cryptocurrency, but there shouldn't be a technical reason why it can't be done. This is in sharp contrast to traditional currencies: You can't send in the police to confiscate 5% of everyone's dollar bills.
      - aninhumer 13y ago
        If you reduce everyone's balance at once, it doesn't really have any effect on the money supply, all you're really doing is changing the numbers people use.
aw3c2 13y ago
That's great! Anything that drives away people who want to "invest" in DOGE for dollar exchange is a good thing.
- greyman 13y ago
  Why is it a good thing?
known 13y ago
Unless https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry#Adverse_selection https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry#Advers... is implemented in the protocol, I'd not invest.
Eliezer 13y ago
The really amusing part is that their trolling represents better economic policy than Bitcoin.
- VMG 13y ago
  Better for the collective, maybe, but removing selfish incentives for hoarding and mining Alt-coin will lead to low adoption and depreciation. Same problem with Peercoin: http://www.peercoin.net/ http://www.peercoin.net/
- drewblaisdell 13y ago
  I'm sure you'll get voted up because the HN crowd loves to hate things, but I'm honestly curious why anyone would think this is objectively a better economic policy. Regardless of the inflation vs. deflation debate, the same exact thing could happen in bitcoin if it is what the community wants.
  - kevinpet 13y ago
    Ideally, the money supply grows at the same rate as the economy. In this case "the economy" is the segment using Dogecoin. If you can't get it right, most people consider it better to have a bit of inflation rather than deflation. This may just be a consequence of people being more used to inflation and able to deal with it. For example, people don't mind prices going up as much as they mind their income going down.
    - natrius 13y ago
      Low, steady inflation is better for an economy than the alternatives humanity has experienced thus far. However, if people had the choice between holding a currency they expected to slowly decrease in value like today's central bank currencies and a currency they expected to slowly increase in value like Bitcoin in a post-adoption world, why would anyone pick the former? Central banks have only had the ability to steer the economy because they controlled the best currencies available in the eyes of consumers. Dollars are much easier to deal with than gold, so people use them even though they know the dollars will be worth less than the equivalent gold in a year or two. When Bitcoin is as easy to use for trade as dollars are, people won't choose dollars, nor will they chose inflationary altcoins.
IgorPartola 13y ago
So the thing that's interesting to me is that now you can actually diversify your altcoin holdings and while the value of any one coin can go up or down, the market value you are holding can actually be fairly stable. For example, as Dogecoin loses value as a result of this inflation, you will likely be able to switch to a different coin starting with a new blockchain. In fact, I wonder if the solution to all this is some type of "metacoin" that would represent the averaged out value of various coins. For example, I used to mine scrypt-based coins, then have them automatically traded for BTC via http://www.middlecoin.com/ http://www.middlecoin.com/. It's an interesting concept as I would not be able to mine BTC directly on any hardware I own, but I can mine a small amount of scrpyt-based coins. Perhaps the idea of holding value the same way can be introduced. Sort of like a mutual fund of coins. And a coin industry index (Standard & Bits?)
norswap 13y ago
Am I the only one puzzled by the fact that the title sounds like something has changed when the linked status says: "Thanks for contributing to this discussion. Based on everyone’s feedback, we’ve decided to leave the Dogecoin code base as it was originally released, and not implement a change." Which means that in fact, nothing has changed and it was always like this.
- LoganCale 13y ago
  It was advertised as being capped and it turned out they hadn't coded a cap into it. If you read the entire thread, the developers appear to just realize this as well after the issue is reported. They then later decide to keep it as it is, which is a change to what was advertised.
Nursie 13y ago
This is actually starting to sound like a far better currency than bitcoin could ever be. You know, a liquid medium of exchange rather than a deflationary libertarian wet dream. All the best ideas are jokes.
- greyman 13y ago
  I tend to agree with you. Moreover, there is an issue of keeping the incentive to mine. The theory is, that when a coin is mined, and when it will become popular, there will be a lot of transactions, and the fees will make up a large sum worth mining for. But that's only a theory, it wasn't seen yet. I feel it is much better that miners can still mine their 10k doges per block. Yet another reason is, that certain amount of coins is being lost forever due to human errors. So the increase will be even less.
- oafitupa 13y ago
  What do you mean "liquid"? I hear this a lot from Americans, who don't understand the concept of decimals and units based on powers of ten.
  - bogs_carut 13y ago
    I'm fairly certain that the kind of Americans who frequent HN can perform trivial arithmetic.
- kolev 13y ago
  Hoarding and speculation is killing Bitcoin. I initially discounted Dogecoin, but it seems that smart people are behind it and the whole thing radiates a lot more positive energy than the greed radiating from Bitcoin.
themgt 13y ago
Seems like one of the major unasked questions - what sort of monetary policy will work best for cryptocurrency. And what will be the decision process for that policy. The technoanarchists have conspicuously elided this question.
kevinpet 13y ago
I didn't realize how much people were consciously trying to get in on a bubble. It's like people are offended that the developers are trying to create a viable currency rather than a ponzi scheme.
- atmosx 13y ago
  Sure, people are stupid. I thought programmers were not, but reading large part of HN's crowd statement's about BTC have changed my views on programmers - they are pretty stupid when they don't understand the dynamic of a subject (i.e. basic economics). However, the problem with inflation is that might turn the currency not interesting: Why would anyone want to buy an inflationary currency? Sure gold is inflationary now, but might not be tomorrow and sure as hell comparing any virtual currency to gold is naive. I'm sure BitCoin was marketed as a currency to outsmart the naives and has successfully done that. It was never designed to act as a currency, it was more of an asset from day 1. We just didn't really get that (from day one).
  - Nursie 13y ago
    >> However, the problem with inflation is that might turn the currency not interesting: Why would anyone want to buy an inflationary currency? Why the hell should anyone want to invest in a currency anyway? It's a medium of exchange!
    - kolev 13y ago
      Cryptocurrency, duh. :) The whole thing is an amateur hour. Why would anyone invest into something that wasn't meant for investment?
    - atmosx 13y ago
      Awesome answer! Wasn't expecting that! And why would I exchange in dogecoins and not in Australian Dollars?
  - 3pt14159 13y ago
    Bitcoin is spelled without capitalizing the C - it makes the comment look uninformed.
wcummings 13y ago
I'm curious how they're going to deal with dust/a very large blockchain
fleshweasel 13y ago
My serious business cryptocurrency names it after a silly internet picture
rafeed 13y ago
I can't help but LOL at anyone who thought this was going to be the next Bitcoin and were going to "get rich" with this. Seems smart to keep more doge in play, but it'll also kill a lot of the interest in it as well from the people who were buying to "get in" on it. Funny every time.
fizx 13y ago
5B/year is an odd choice, because the rate of inflation starts very high, but will asymptotically approach zero over time. This doesn't seem well thought out.
edmccard 13y ago
Will this tend to discourage dogecoin market manipulation like that discussed here about a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7126153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7126153
deleted 13y ago
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mrjaeger 13y ago
So why doesn't Bitcoin do this as well? Just their core philosophy that deflation is not an inherently bad thing? This seems like a great move and will attract a lot of people who believe in traditional economics. Now if only I could buy Doges from my Coinbase account...
dgacmu 13y ago
This entire debate is a great example of how people don't understand math or the idea of inflation. A constant rate of new coins trickling into the currency creates a rate of inflation that decreases over time until it reaches equilibrium with the coins exiting the system. The devs have, intentionally or unintentionally, created a coin whose quantity will become roughly fixed (at a number they can't predict exactly), instead of one that where the supply will diminish over time due to loss (as in Bitcoin). Perhaps I should know better than to expect reason when it comes to greed, however.
- oafitupa 13y ago
  Unintentionally. It was a bug, but now dogecoiners are claiming it was designed that way by geniuses, like they always do.
pavel_lishin 13y ago
> Cool. Thanks for killing the profitability of the currency. Now it's going to be worthless in a couple of years and never reach the value of BitCoin or even anywhere close. I don't think that's what currencies are for.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
patrickg_zill 13y ago
Note that the effect of this inflation, being fixed, lessens each year. After 100 Billion coins, the next year there are 105, for a rate of 5%. The next year, the rate will be 4.76% ; then 4.55, 4.35%, 4.17%, 4.0%, etc. in later years.
hmhrex 13y ago
Yup. There goes my 5 bucks.
naveen99 13y ago
dogecoin is an interesting dual to bitcoin for experimenting with money. Microtransactions are relatively unregulated / ignored by the tax collectors of the world. Small gifts / capital gains under some quantitiy are usually not reportable. Even children buy and sell baseball cards, comic books, marbles etc... I could imagine children using dogecoin or fedoracoin / TIPS. Are they going to enforce AML / KYC on transacations worth 0.015 cents through a tipbot ?
beedogs 13y ago
And as soon as this news broke, DOGE/BTC went down to .00000154 from a high of .00000185.
rajacombinator 13y ago
this has interesting implications for BTC. selling mine soon ...
jeffool 13y ago
Any interest in the thought of Bitcoin (currently) as only 30% currency, and 70% commodity?
godseyeview 13y ago
How can dogecoin change their total supply after release? I thought the point of crypto currency was that the supply and rate of generation is declared upfront during release? The developers can change the supply whenever they want? whats to stop bitcoin from recapping its limit on supply???!!!!

206 points by ck2 13y ago

ck2 13y ago

"ummjackson" has appeared on HN before so perhaps they will comment here as to how dogecoin could ever exceed 1000 satoshi with this decision. That is several new coins for every active person on the internet, every year. Also, the blockchain might require terabytes after a decade. ps. if you do show up, please clarify if it is going to be a zero to 10k reward which is a different situation, or actually 10k fixed per block

somewhatjustin 13y ago
I don't see how they plan on keeping any sort of stable price with this inflation.
- kybernetyk 13y ago
  My understanding was that Dogecoin doesn't want to become a "serious" currency and the sentiment in the community against the BTC-community is that they take themselves far too serious. This decision makes sense if Doge intends to stay the "great comment, I give you 10000 doge for that" fun-currency and drive out everybody whose primary intention is financial gain.
  - ck2 13y ago
    If that is the case the tipbots should not show USD next to the amount.
    - publicfig 13y ago
      At least in my opinion, that's part of the joke, showing such a small amount next to such a large amount of coins.
  - waterlesscloud 13y ago
    If the coin has no value, you might well just say "great comment, I give you 10000 doge for that" without the hassle of actually giving doge. Why have a whole system that accomplishes no more than merely typing the words did? Stick with the words. Easier, faster, just as much fun.
    - aestra 13y ago
      Kinda like how people used to say "+1 internets for you"?
    - sixothree 13y ago
      Or heck, you could have greasemonkey scripts that tie the upvote button to tips.
    - kybernetyk 13y ago
      > Easier, faster, just as much fun Easier? Yes. Faster? Yes. Just as much fun? I don't know. Psychologically a Doge has still more perceived worth than than karma. At least to me.
- aw3c2 13y ago
  1 DOGE will be 1 DOGE for eternity. If that is not 100% stable then I don't know what is.
- uniclaude 13y ago
  Are you assuming that fixed supply leads to price stability? If so, please expand.
ceejayoz 13y ago
> Also, the blockchain might require terabytes after a decade. Imagine saying "the blockchain might require gigabytes after a decade" in 2004. Here in 2014, you can get 64 GB on something the size of your smallest fingernail for $30-$40. Terabytes after a decade won't matter a bit.
- kzrdude 13y ago
  You need a corresponding growth in bandwidth, too, otherwise transfer, sync, backup, restore, etc times will only grow.
  - ceejayoz 13y ago
    How much bandwidth did you have in 2004? I definitely didn't have 50/5 Mbps back then...
    - kzrdude 13y ago
      I did have 10MBps and a while before that 100MBps just because of the campus network. Today in a residential area I have 22MBps down, 16 up (measured). However, that result might actually be capped by my wifi. I should have 60-100 MBps. That said, I was thinking of it all, memory bus, disk r/w speed etc.
doyoulikeworms 13y ago
Fixed at 10k per block, says he: https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/issues/23#issuecomment-33893825 https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/issues/23#issuecomment-...

LoganCale 13y ago

This effectively killed my interest in the currency completely. I've stopped mining it. I suspect this may be what they want: to keep it basically worthless so people keep using it to tip people large amounts and have fun with it, and to drive away investors and people looking to profit.

colanderman 13y ago
to drive away investors and people looking to profit. Holy shit, you mean it's a currency that will encourage trading rather than hoarding? The horror!
- ck2 13y ago
  Why would you trade it? You can just mine more as you need it? You aren't going to sell any goods for it because the value today is likely worth less tomorrow unless you can "cash it out" immediately.
  - colanderman 13y ago
    Why would you trade it? You can just mine more as you need it? Mining is resource-intensive. the value today is likely worth less tomorrow unless you can "cash it out" immediately. Exactly! Not only is this like almost every other good on the planet, it encourages trade.
    - ck2 13y ago
      In 2015 it won't be resource intensive. We should be on 3rd or 4th generation asic scrypt miners by then which maybe means you'll be able to get a $20 usb stick that makes you 10k coins a month with a single kilowatt of power per month.
      - benmanns 13y ago
        But when everyone has a $20 USB stick capable of mining 10k coins a month on today's difficulty, that difficulty will go up dramatically. Mining will always be expensive to everyone but those with early access to next generation hardware.

mkr-hn 13y ago

What I like about doegcoin is that everyone realizes it's a joke and has fun with it.

ck2 13y ago
There are a great many people spending a whole lot on power and hardware who probably aren't laughing so much at the joke.
- mkr-hn 13y ago
  This is a risk when you invest in something where a small number of people can fundamentally change it on a whim. Remember Zynga's warning about its dependence on Facebook in its IPO filing?
- girvo 13y ago
  Well, that's their loss for taking a gamble on it. Not everything is a sure bet, and even those that look like it might turn out not to be :)
- merloen 13y ago
  Oh, but we're laughing at them!
- smtddr 13y ago
  That's because those people... ARE the joke! But seriously, Dogecoin was a way-out-there bet. You can't be upset if it doesn't work out. Also, I've seen enough "devastating-end-of-the-world" news on cryptos that make the price tank only to come right back up a month or 2 later. Maybe this'll be reversed after the price tanks & difficulty drops. I'm keeping my doge miners going... You never know. But I'm fully prepared to find out it was all for naught. Easier for me to say since I don't spend anything to mine them. My job gives me limited but free access to cloud servers.

colanderman 13y ago

Hm, kinda wish it was a percentage rather than a fixed amount. Eventually 5 billion will be but a small percentage of the total. Kudos nonetheless; glad there's finally a digi-coin that might sort of kind of be fungible for real-world wealth.

gus_massa 13y ago

Really, 5 billons appear to be a lot, but it will be only a 5% the fist year after the initial mining period is complete. And after 20 years the annual inflation will be only 2.5% if no doge is lost. [Disclaimer: I’m from Argentina, where a 5% annual inflation would be really nice.]

cocoflunchy 13y ago

Lots of good discussion on the reddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/1wsg31/dogecoin_will_not_be_capped_at_100_billion/ http://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/1wsg31/dogecoin_wi... I think this is good news overall.

girvo 13y ago

Man, I really feel like those who are upset about this truly wanted it to be "their Bitcoin" -- the cryptocurrency they got on the ground floor for and were hoping would turn out like BTC has. And to be fair, it sorted started looking that way. But now, as it's been decided to be "inflationary" (like the USD currently), they feel that the party is over. And I get it. That sucks. Personally, I think it's a great thing for Doge. It'll keep up the current "tipping culture", discourage hoarding, and encourage us doge to trade and share, til we get to the moon. Such wow. Amaze. :D

ck2 13y ago
Does "to the moon" mean $1 per coin? If so, how is dogecoin going to create five billion USD per year via coin buyers to pay for its inflation? Unless it means something else and I am missing the point?
- girvo 13y ago
  Who cares! That's the point ;) Also, "to the moon" is a dogecoin reddit joke, it doesn't mean anything in particular
  - mkr-hn 13y ago
    Much like dogecoin and its relation to bitcoin, "to the moon" is a long-running thing that transcends any single Internet event. To the moon is simultaneously the moon and the path to the moon.
  - oafitupa 13y ago
    A dogecoin joke? Are you serious? Bitcoiners have been screaming to the moon for years. But now it's doge's joke? Is there anything else you want to copy without improvement?
    - officemonkey 13y ago
      Such wow. So animosity. Doge let Bitcoin have moon too. Many room.

saalweachter 13y ago

Oh god, they really are master trolls. The hilarious thing to note here is that -- over the short term -- this is barely different than Bitcoin's inflation rate. Bitcoin halves its inflation rate every 4 years, but 4 years is a long time in internet time. Here, let's lay them out side by side: INFLATION RATE BY YEAR YEAR BITCOIN DOGECOIN 1 inf% inf% 2 100% 100% 3 50% 50% 4 33.3% 33.3% 5 12.5% 25% 6 11.1% 20% 7 10% 16.6% 8 9.1% 14.3% So while there is an important distinction between Bitcoin's and Dogecoin's inflation rates (Bitcoin's money supply is convergent; Dogecoin's is divergent despite a monotonically decreasing inflation rate), 8 years after their respective epochs, Dogecoin's inflation rate will be 5.2% higher than Bitcoin's. The horrors! The horrors!

ck2 13y ago
Hmm. Interesting chart but could you explain how you are calculating inflation? Dogecoin reward halves every other month until mid 2015
- saalweachter 13y ago
  Sorry; I was just working off the "5 billion coins a year" title. I am just taking the number of new coins created in a year, and dividing it by the number of coins already in the money supply. So if Bitcoin was creating X bitcoins per year for the first four years, the inflation rate for year four was X / 3X = 33%. In year 5, they halved the reward rate, so the inflation rate for year 5 was X/2 / 4X = 12.5%, and for year 6 it was X/2 / (4X + X/2) = 11.1%. If Dogecoin were minting a constant 5 billion coins per year, then the inflation rate is much simpler: it is always (100/N)%, which is the well-known harmonic series. Accounting for the initial money supply of 100 billion Dogecoins, it basically just starts further down the harmonic series, and Dogecoin's inflation rate would be 100/(20+X)%, which looks like 5%, 4.8%, 4.5%, 4.3%, 4.2%...
ye 13y ago
Oh, but you conveniently omitted what happens after. 10, 20, 50 years. The truly important difference is that Bitcoin has an absolute upper limit, but Doge doesn't anymore. It matters. Scarcity is an important factor for holding value. Bitcoin will eventually become deflationary, and sooner than you think due to loss of bitcoins.

hippich 13y ago

finally some major alt coin done this :) One of major complain about bitcoin is the fact of limited supply of coins. I.e. deflationary currency. But as you can see now - this is nothing more then just an agreement between people using bitcoin (or dogecoin) If majority of dogecoin owners will not like it - they will fork it. Otherwise we will have nice example of inflationary currency.

naughtysriram 13y ago

When will someone make a DOUCHECOIN?

doodyhead 13y ago

This is the one feature that will uniquely distinguish Dogecoin from other cryptocurrencies: - It makes the currency much more democratic -- missed the first few months of mining? jump in any time you like and still reap the benefits! - It neatly circumvents the issue of lost coins -- Bitcoins will keep dwindling over time and there will be no way to keep a consistent number of coins in circulation - Inflation puts to bed one of the major concerns raised by many traditional economists about Dogecoin; deflation does seem to encourage hoarding - As a corollary, inflation encourages spending, the growth engine of every modern economy. Like it or not, it works. I'm mining as much Dogecoin as a I can and will keep doing so. I think this is great news! To the moon!!

ck2 13y ago
I was trying to think of positives to this and the "democratic" concept is also something I hit upon, good point. I just kinda worry 5 Billion is too much. Maybe zero to 10k random would be better like the zero to million it started with.
walden42 13y ago
The free market takes care of all your points, except the first one, which isn't a big deal, really. - Lost coins? Analysis can make good estimations of how many coins are lost. The market price will adjust. - Yes, it puts down concerns from people who believe that inflation is necessary, that is true. Whether deflation is bad is another story, and again, the market takes care of it. If value of the currency goes up over time ("encouraging hoarding"), then the reverse also holds true: merchants lower pricing to encourage spending because they'd rather have bitcoins/litecoins/whatevercoins than the alternatives. - Same as above. The deflationary aspect has been discussed extensively already, so there's no need to go much further. Here are some nice responses: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/66/will-deflation-destroy-bitcoin http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/66/will-deflation... Now, as to whether this decision was good or bad, I think it's fairly neutral. If the currency was capped, then I'd say there wouldn't be much to distinguish it from litecoin or bitcoin. This just seems like a way to add a new-ish aspect to it. I'm all for experimenting with multiple currencies, multiple ways of doing things, and I'm interested in seeing what'll happen. Perhaps 10 billion dogecoin will eventually become irrelevant because its value will be too low (akin to spending a ton of resources to mine a few pennies). Or maybe not. I'm rooting for all cryptocurrencies in general nontheless.

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lettergram 13y ago

If they can add inflation they can take it away... and on another note, inflation (or at least lack of deflation) will increase spending of that currency. In other words, it would help Dogecoins be used more, as opposed to hoarding like bitcoins.

gwern 13y ago
> If they can add inflation they can take it away... The longer a coin runs, the harder it gets. And if I'm reading this bug report correctly, it's not that they're 'adding inflation', it's that they're declining to change an erroneous setting and maintaining the status quo. The more clients that come out, the more that setting will get locked in...
- michaelt 13y ago
  How are settings like this updated? Is it like the blockchain fork, where the settings are hardcoded into the client, so the longest chain uses whatever settings are in the client most popular with miners? For example, if someone with a lot of resources wanted to adjust the inflation settings for bitcoin, how would they go about it?

muyuu 13y ago

That was the original plan. Nothing has changed. It's a small constant creation that will converge towards 0% inflation over time, and will stabilize with coins lost and destroyed. Great idea IMO.

Glyptodon 13y ago

I'm surprised that there isn't a cryptocurrency that uses much more complex rules to determine the number of coins mined in each subsequent block. It seems like the blockchain could be used to evaluate the health of currency's ecosystem in a way similar to taking a look at the system monitor or result or cat/proc/loadavg on your desktop. Heck, the blockchain could even be used to store 'extra' system state information with every block, like current exchange rates with other currencies, which would then be used to determine the reward for the next block. I guess all I'm saying is that I'm surprised there's not a version of bitcoin with an algorithmic 'central bank' type of function, rather than a very straightforward 'inflationary' or 'deflationary' algorithm.

philwelch 13y ago
Milton Friedman was a monetarist, who believed that the ideal monetary policy was for the currency base to grow in time with real economic growth since this would result in neither inflation nor deflation of prices. If you could deduce economic growth from the blockchain you could make a Friedman coin.
- judk 13y ago
  That would require destroying coins during a recession.
  - marvin 13y ago
    Bitcoin/Dogecoin is basically a public ledger. Couldn't the system be set up so that this system of rules did destroy coins during a recession by reducing everybody's balance? It could probably be gamed very easily by speculators going in and out of the cryptocurrency, but there shouldn't be a technical reason why it can't be done. This is in sharp contrast to traditional currencies: You can't send in the police to confiscate 5% of everyone's dollar bills.
    - aninhumer 13y ago
      If you reduce everyone's balance at once, it doesn't really have any effect on the money supply, all you're really doing is changing the numbers people use.

aw3c2 13y ago

That's great! Anything that drives away people who want to "invest" in DOGE for dollar exchange is a good thing.

greyman 13y ago
Why is it a good thing?

known 13y ago

Unless https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry#Adverse_selection https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry#Advers... is implemented in the protocol, I'd not invest.

Eliezer 13y ago

The really amusing part is that their trolling represents better economic policy than Bitcoin.

VMG 13y ago
Better for the collective, maybe, but removing selfish incentives for hoarding and mining Alt-coin will lead to low adoption and depreciation. Same problem with Peercoin: http://www.peercoin.net/ http://www.peercoin.net/
drewblaisdell 13y ago
I'm sure you'll get voted up because the HN crowd loves to hate things, but I'm honestly curious why anyone would think this is objectively a better economic policy. Regardless of the inflation vs. deflation debate, the same exact thing could happen in bitcoin if it is what the community wants.
- kevinpet 13y ago
  Ideally, the money supply grows at the same rate as the economy. In this case "the economy" is the segment using Dogecoin. If you can't get it right, most people consider it better to have a bit of inflation rather than deflation. This may just be a consequence of people being more used to inflation and able to deal with it. For example, people don't mind prices going up as much as they mind their income going down.
  - natrius 13y ago
    Low, steady inflation is better for an economy than the alternatives humanity has experienced thus far. However, if people had the choice between holding a currency they expected to slowly decrease in value like today's central bank currencies and a currency they expected to slowly increase in value like Bitcoin in a post-adoption world, why would anyone pick the former? Central banks have only had the ability to steer the economy because they controlled the best currencies available in the eyes of consumers. Dollars are much easier to deal with than gold, so people use them even though they know the dollars will be worth less than the equivalent gold in a year or two. When Bitcoin is as easy to use for trade as dollars are, people won't choose dollars, nor will they chose inflationary altcoins.

IgorPartola 13y ago

So the thing that's interesting to me is that now you can actually diversify your altcoin holdings and while the value of any one coin can go up or down, the market value you are holding can actually be fairly stable. For example, as Dogecoin loses value as a result of this inflation, you will likely be able to switch to a different coin starting with a new blockchain. In fact, I wonder if the solution to all this is some type of "metacoin" that would represent the averaged out value of various coins. For example, I used to mine scrypt-based coins, then have them automatically traded for BTC via http://www.middlecoin.com/ http://www.middlecoin.com/. It's an interesting concept as I would not be able to mine BTC directly on any hardware I own, but I can mine a small amount of scrpyt-based coins. Perhaps the idea of holding value the same way can be introduced. Sort of like a mutual fund of coins. And a coin industry index (Standard & Bits?)

norswap 13y ago

Am I the only one puzzled by the fact that the title sounds like something has changed when the linked status says: "Thanks for contributing to this discussion. Based on everyone’s feedback, we’ve decided to leave the Dogecoin code base as it was originally released, and not implement a change." Which means that in fact, nothing has changed and it was always like this.

LoganCale 13y ago
It was advertised as being capped and it turned out they hadn't coded a cap into it. If you read the entire thread, the developers appear to just realize this as well after the issue is reported. They then later decide to keep it as it is, which is a change to what was advertised.

Nursie 13y ago

This is actually starting to sound like a far better currency than bitcoin could ever be. You know, a liquid medium of exchange rather than a deflationary libertarian wet dream. All the best ideas are jokes.

greyman 13y ago
I tend to agree with you. Moreover, there is an issue of keeping the incentive to mine. The theory is, that when a coin is mined, and when it will become popular, there will be a lot of transactions, and the fees will make up a large sum worth mining for. But that's only a theory, it wasn't seen yet. I feel it is much better that miners can still mine their 10k doges per block. Yet another reason is, that certain amount of coins is being lost forever due to human errors. So the increase will be even less.
oafitupa 13y ago
What do you mean "liquid"? I hear this a lot from Americans, who don't understand the concept of decimals and units based on powers of ten.
- bogs_carut 13y ago
  I'm fairly certain that the kind of Americans who frequent HN can perform trivial arithmetic.
kolev 13y ago
Hoarding and speculation is killing Bitcoin. I initially discounted Dogecoin, but it seems that smart people are behind it and the whole thing radiates a lot more positive energy than the greed radiating from Bitcoin.

themgt 13y ago

Seems like one of the major unasked questions - what sort of monetary policy will work best for cryptocurrency. And what will be the decision process for that policy. The technoanarchists have conspicuously elided this question.

kevinpet 13y ago

I didn't realize how much people were consciously trying to get in on a bubble. It's like people are offended that the developers are trying to create a viable currency rather than a ponzi scheme.

atmosx 13y ago
Sure, people are stupid. I thought programmers were not, but reading large part of HN's crowd statement's about BTC have changed my views on programmers - they are pretty stupid when they don't understand the dynamic of a subject (i.e. basic economics). However, the problem with inflation is that might turn the currency not interesting: Why would anyone want to buy an inflationary currency? Sure gold is inflationary now, but might not be tomorrow and sure as hell comparing any virtual currency to gold is naive. I'm sure BitCoin was marketed as a currency to outsmart the naives and has successfully done that. It was never designed to act as a currency, it was more of an asset from day 1. We just didn't really get that (from day one).
- Nursie 13y ago
  >> However, the problem with inflation is that might turn the currency not interesting: Why would anyone want to buy an inflationary currency? Why the hell should anyone want to invest in a currency anyway? It's a medium of exchange!
  - kolev 13y ago
    Cryptocurrency, duh. :) The whole thing is an amateur hour. Why would anyone invest into something that wasn't meant for investment?
  - atmosx 13y ago
    Awesome answer! Wasn't expecting that! And why would I exchange in dogecoins and not in Australian Dollars?
- 3pt14159 13y ago
  Bitcoin is spelled without capitalizing the C - it makes the comment look uninformed.

wcummings 13y ago

I'm curious how they're going to deal with dust/a very large blockchain

fleshweasel 13y ago

My serious business cryptocurrency names it after a silly internet picture

rafeed 13y ago

I can't help but LOL at anyone who thought this was going to be the next Bitcoin and were going to "get rich" with this. Seems smart to keep more doge in play, but it'll also kill a lot of the interest in it as well from the people who were buying to "get in" on it. Funny every time.

fizx 13y ago

5B/year is an odd choice, because the rate of inflation starts very high, but will asymptotically approach zero over time. This doesn't seem well thought out.

edmccard 13y ago

Will this tend to discourage dogecoin market manipulation like that discussed here about a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7126153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7126153

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mrjaeger 13y ago

So why doesn't Bitcoin do this as well? Just their core philosophy that deflation is not an inherently bad thing? This seems like a great move and will attract a lot of people who believe in traditional economics. Now if only I could buy Doges from my Coinbase account...

dgacmu 13y ago

This entire debate is a great example of how people don't understand math or the idea of inflation. A constant rate of new coins trickling into the currency creates a rate of inflation that decreases over time until it reaches equilibrium with the coins exiting the system. The devs have, intentionally or unintentionally, created a coin whose quantity will become roughly fixed (at a number they can't predict exactly), instead of one that where the supply will diminish over time due to loss (as in Bitcoin). Perhaps I should know better than to expect reason when it comes to greed, however.

oafitupa 13y ago
Unintentionally. It was a bug, but now dogecoiners are claiming it was designed that way by geniuses, like they always do.

pavel_lishin 13y ago

> Cool. Thanks for killing the profitability of the currency. Now it's going to be worthless in a couple of years and never reach the value of BitCoin or even anywhere close. I don't think that's what currencies are for.

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patrickg_zill 13y ago

Note that the effect of this inflation, being fixed, lessens each year. After 100 Billion coins, the next year there are 105, for a rate of 5%. The next year, the rate will be 4.76% ; then 4.55, 4.35%, 4.17%, 4.0%, etc. in later years.

hmhrex 13y ago

Yup. There goes my 5 bucks.

naveen99 13y ago

dogecoin is an interesting dual to bitcoin for experimenting with money. Microtransactions are relatively unregulated / ignored by the tax collectors of the world. Small gifts / capital gains under some quantitiy are usually not reportable. Even children buy and sell baseball cards, comic books, marbles etc... I could imagine children using dogecoin or fedoracoin / TIPS. Are they going to enforce AML / KYC on transacations worth 0.015 cents through a tipbot ?

beedogs 13y ago

And as soon as this news broke, DOGE/BTC went down to .00000154 from a high of .00000185.

rajacombinator 13y ago

this has interesting implications for BTC. selling mine soon ...

jeffool 13y ago

Any interest in the thought of Bitcoin (currently) as only 30% currency, and 70% commodity?

godseyeview 13y ago

How can dogecoin change their total supply after release? I thought the point of crypto currency was that the supply and rate of generation is declared upfront during release? The developers can change the supply whenever they want? whats to stop bitcoin from recapping its limit on supply???!!!!