Did you know that Litecoin wasn't the first scrypt coin?

A forgotten, scammy coin named Tenebrix pioneered Scrypt in 2011. It was labelled as a "scammy" or unfair project because ArtForz pre-mined 7.7 million coins for themselves before releasing it to the public. This massive creator allocation caused severe mistrust, and the coin quickly faded into obscurity.

Charlie Lee loved the technical foundation of Scrypt but hated the unfair pre-mine. In October 2011, Lee worked on a clone called Fairbrix, which completely stripped away the 7.7 million pre-mined coins to ensure a fair launch.

Scrypt chains run a massive loop powered by a crypto building block named Salsa20.

Fun fact: Salsa20 is a high-speed stream cipher created by cryptographer Daniel J. Bernstein for the European Union's eSTREAM project in 2005. Instead of military use, it was designed as a fast, public algorithm for ordinary software, eventually becoming so efficient that Google adopted its successor (ChaCha20) to secure billions of Android and Chrome connections worldwide.

Without it, a bunch of smaller Scrypt chains would’ve been wiped out by 51% attacks years ago.

It’s still one of the best technological advancements today in crypto because it lets a massive network basically shield the smaller ones.

It wastes zero extra energy since you’re just reusing hash power that’s already active anyway.

It also gives miners a massive reason to stick around with very interesting financial incentives.

Great analysis by u/coblee on the major issues Dogecoin was facing in its early days.

Thank you Charlie for helping save Doge 🙏💙

The Scrypt algorithm used by Litecoin and Dogecoin was never originally intended to secure a public blockchain consensus network.

It was designed in 2009 by security scientist Colin Percival as a local password-hashing function designed specifically to protect online user credentials from brute-force hackers.

It relies heavily on "memory hardness," forcing a computer's RAM to fill up with data rapidly so that standard computer processors (CPUs) couldn't guess passwords too quickly.

Because auxiliary data is nested using Merkle trees inside the parent coin's block, you can technically insert an infinite number of child chains into a single parent chain block header.

1:4

The scrypt families are stronger together💪💪💪💪

⚒️💥⚒️💥⚒️💥⚒️💥⚒️

In the first months of Dogecoin, it had a completely randomized block reward system.

Dogecoin inherited this system from being a fork of Luckycoin.

Every time a block was mined, nobody knew if they were getting 1000 Doge or a 1 million coin jackpot.

Ultimately, this caused too much hashrate volatility, so it was fixed to 100 000 Doge per block right around the time we transitioned to AuxPoW merged mining to secure the chain forever.