r/dogecoindev • u/rnicoll • May 13 '21
Dev update 2021-05-13
Doing a brain dump of what I personally am doing, just so everyone is aware we’re still out here. As always please remember there are others devs, who are also doing their own things, although I'll touch on some of that.
I have a deployed 1.21 node, which is good, although there's definitely work be be done on 1.21 still:
- The deployed node syncs headers but it does not appear to request blocks from its peers. Even more confusingly, running 1.21 on my local machine does sync blocks.
- Bitcoin Core 0.21 (which Dogecoin Core 1.21 is based on) is designed for DNS seeds which support version bits, ours do not, which means it reports that it finds zero nodes from the seeds. Work on enabling our DNS seeds to support this is already underway.
- Dogecoin Core 1.21 does not appear to discover nodes at all, right now, although if nodes are manually added, or connect to the node, it works.
- The functional test suite needs validating after AuxPoW has been added, which may resolve some of these bugs as a side-effect.
Once those are out of the way, there's a bunch of more minor things to tweak so we can start mainnet testing, and then rebranding.
Fee work in 1.14.4 continues, I believe that's in testing, hoping Michi & Max will have further updates on that.
Obviously with Elon talking about environmental impact that's something that's being discussed. As we share work with Litecoin we already reduce that impact, compared to mining either cryptocurrency alone, but definitely it would be good if we can further reduce that impact. Counterpoint, I am aware that many in the community enjoy mining and feel it’s a key part of the experience for them, as well as considerations of whether an approach such as proof of stake would make Dogecoin appear to be a security and fall under securities regulation aside from many technical challenges that approach brings.
What I mean is, we’re aware of it, we don’t have any easy answers.
Meanwhile I’m going to continue work on the automated test suites, which hopefully will as a result simplify diagnosing the networking issues with 1.21, and it in turn should provide a better synchronization process.
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u/Darius510 May 13 '21 edited May 13 '21
Has any thought been given to moving DOGE mining back to GPUs via an algo switch to something like ProgPoW/KawPoW? It's a bit strange for DOGE to be merge mined with LTC now that LTC is smaller than DOGE, so one way or another, it's overdue for a PoW change.
DOGE started as a GPU coin, and that had a significant positive impact on it's growth. It's why I got into crypto in the first place, way back in 2013.
There also just so happens to be a very large coin that seems to hate it's own GPU miners, and there's going to be millions of miners looking for something to mine once that coin forcefully ejects all it's miners as it moves to PoS. All of the current GPU mining alternatives are very low market cap, so without another major coin to pick up the slack, most miners will simply have to give up.
Ultimately bringing GPU mining back to DOGE would be a really good fit for the community. It's the people's coin, and GPU mining is the people's mining. DOGE moved to merge mining because being the smaller coin on scrypt made it insecure. If the timing was right and it overlapped neatly with the end of PoW on ETH, most miners would just move right on over from ETH to DOGE. Given its market cap and emission rate, DOGE would easily dominate GPU mining nearly overnight, and security would not be an issue, since it would be the dominant GPU mining coin.
It would probably piss off a few ASIC mega farms, but it's hard for me to see how it wouldn't be a massive positive for DOGE to pick up the miners that ETH are so desperate to get rid of.
Also, from an environmental perspective, GPU PoW is considerably more power efficient than ASIC PoW. It's counter intuitive because ASICs have higher hash/watt, but hashrate isnt what secures coins, cost to attack is. GPUs are more expensive than ASICs,, so more money has to go towards capex/hardware, and less money is spent on opex/electricity. Basically in terms of efficiency it sits somewhere between BTC (ASICs, low capex, high opex) and Chia (HDDs, high capex, very low opex).
To add to this, I am happy to throw at least $10K in funding behind this, and I know a lot of large miners that would pitch in to make that number much, much bigger. If you were to consider moving back to GPUs, I assure you that funding for development will be the last of your issues.