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Dogecoin is monetizing user generated content, an economic revolution online. Micropayments for creators are becoming a reality. From the article comments: "T

Dogecoin is monetizing user generated content, an economic revolution online. Micropayments for creators are becoming a reality. From the article comments: "They're also digging wells in Africa and training companion dogs. It's a real party over at /r/dogecoin. Someone gave me thirty bucks for telling a joke."

tlrobinson 13y ago
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/main.h#L30 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to be plenty of time for new blocks to flood the network, otherwise forks will become more common as miners work on outdated information.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.
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  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.'
  - lappa 13y ago
    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.
    - steveklabnik 13y ago
      > 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
      - tlrobinson 13y ago
        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-massive-Dogecoin-transaction-volume-coming-from https://www.quora.com/Dogecoin/Where-is-the-currently-massiv...
        svantana 13y ago
        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.
        officemonkey 13y ago
        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.
        steveklabnik 13y ago
        Dogetipbot's creators say it's only exchanging about $1500 USD/day of DOGE, so that doesn't explain it.
- willholloway 13y ago
  "... 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 https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability When Dogecoin approaches Paypal's transactions per second an engineering solution will have to be found.
- ck2 13y ago
  3. The blockchain is going to be mind-boggling huge in just a few years, maybe terabytes by the end of the decade.

tlrobinson 13y ago

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/main.h#L30 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.

steveklabnik 13y ago
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.'
- lappa 13y ago
  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.
  - steveklabnik 13y ago
    > 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
    - tlrobinson 13y ago
      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-massive-Dogecoin-transaction-volume-coming-from https://www.quora.com/Dogecoin/Where-is-the-currently-massiv...
      - svantana 13y ago
        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.
      - officemonkey 13y ago
        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.
        steveklabnik 13y ago
        Dogetipbot's creators say it's only exchanging about $1500 USD/day of DOGE, so that doesn't explain it.
willholloway 13y ago
"... 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 https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability When Dogecoin approaches Paypal's transactions per second an engineering solution will have to be found.
ck2 13y ago
3. The blockchain is going to be mind-boggling huge in just a few years, maybe terabytes by the end of the decade.