What is Dogecoin?
Dogecoin is an open source cryptocurrency named after the popular doge Internet meme, which is an image of a shiba inu, a hunting dog of the Japanese breed.
What are the key features of Dogecoin?
Dogecoin is a fork of the Luckycoin cryptocurrency, which in turn is a fork of Litecoin.
- Coin mining algorithm: AuxPoW (auxiliary proof-of-work, alternative proof of work).
- Hash Function: Scrypt.
- Issue: unlimited.
- Block time: 1 minute.
- Reward size: 10,000 coins per block (initially, miners received rewards in a randomized way up to 100,000 coins, in March 2014 a fixed reward was established).
- Difficulty Algorithm: DigiShield.
- Mining difficulty: adjusted with each block.
- Inflation: 5.2 billion DOGE per year.
- Transaction processing speed: 6 minutes.
- Commission for transfers: 1 DOGE regardless of the amount.
Who, when and why created Dogecoin?
Dogecoin was launched after the November 27, 2013 Australian Jackson Palmer, an employee of the sales department of Adobe Systems, decided to make a joke about the rapidly growing number of cryptocurrencies. He said on Twitter that he was investing in a new digital currency and expressed confidence in its imminent success. One of Palmer’s subscribers, a student at Front Range Community College, suggested putting the idea into action. The news of the "dog coin" began to disperse on the net, and Palmer decided to move from words to deeds.
He bought the domain Dogecoin. com , created the basic version of the site, posted on the home page an image of a coin with his favorite doge meme and published a call: “If you want to bring Dogecoin to life, get in touch.”
The American programmer Billy Marcus contacted Palmer, who wanted to create a comic cryptocurrency that would surpass Bitcoin in popularity, and also be distanced from the ambiguous history of other coins. He liked Palmer's idea, and they decided to turn Dogecoin into a real cryptocurrency on the Bitcoin blockchain.
The genesis block was released on December 6, 2013, and on December 8 the official announcement of Dogecoin took place . A few hours after the appearance of the coin, a mining pool was created and the first block was formed.
The duet of the founders still performs under the playful nickname "Sibetoshi Nakamoto", but in 2015 Palmer left the project. Lead developer is Max Keller, other developers are Ross Nicholl and Patrick Lodder.
How is Dogecoin developing?
Soon after the appearance of Dogecoin, its users began to do charity work through the Dogecoin Foundation, created in 2014: they raised funds to send the Jamaican bobsled team to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, to launch two water wells in Kenya, to eliminate the effects of the flood in Kashmir, and also funded NASCAR racer John Wise.
Dogecoin currently has an active community, is available on almost all exchanges, and is supported by many multicurrency wallets.
One of the most popular use cases for Dogecoin is to pay users of social networks that create content or share it.
On September 5, 2018, the Dogethereum Bridge technology, a demo version of the Dogethereum project (DOGX), a smart contract-based system that allows DOGE to move to and from the Ethereum blockchain, and potentially scalable to other compatible ecosystems , was demonstrated.
Dogethereum is based on Dogecoin and runs on the Ethash algorithm. During the launch of the DOGX project, all Doge users received 10,000: 1 DOGX coins (10,000 Doge for 1 DOGX). However, the main Dogethereum branch on Github has not been updated since September 2018, the project’s social networks are abandoned, the volume of trading on a single exchange is scanty.
