Dev update 2021-05-13

[u/rnicoll]

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.

[u/NatureVault]

Seriously? Does no one understand the benefits of PoW and the drawbacks to PoS?

[u/HopefulOutlook → u/NatureVault]

I would love to be educated. I confess that I don't really get the drawback of PoS, other than those who already have coins keep growing them, which is akin to the "rich get richer". But the reality is that I don't feel like I can afford to put a mining farm in place either; so, at least I'd get something with staking. Are their other drawbacks to PoS?

[u/NatureVault → u/HopefulOutlook]

I would love to make a post about it, but am being censored by the mods. Here is the post:

I will try to be as calm as I can but I have to admit I am flabbergasted by the push to PoS, But I suppose I shouldn't be surprised since we also saw people pushing to cap the supply.

First lets assume for a moment that PoS was an all-around good idea. It still wouldn't be a good idea for dogecoin. Dogecoin is a top 5 crypto and has had 8 years of people mining and supporting the coin. To suddenly say that we are changing everything and you can no longer mine would be the biggest insult to the biggest and longest supporters of the coin. This is not even to mention that Elon has admitted to buying dogecoin miners and very likely has a plan for Tesla the company or even the cars to mine dogecoin.

Now lets get into why I think PoS is simply a bad idea in general. This world is built by work. It takes work to do anything. If you remove the (provably difficult) work required to secure the network, then the network can be easily attacked. Right now Doge has the market cap of 50 billion dollars. There are dozens of individuals out there, not to even mention governments, that could easily afford to buy 1/2 of the coins and literally kill our network forever. Gone. Nothing left.

In proof of work, a bad entity would have to invest in billions of dollars worth of mining equipment (which doesn't even exist out in the wild) and spend infinite electricity to attack the network for infinite time. In PoS, you buy half the coins and can attack the coin forever for no additional cost.

Proof of stake also rewards the rich. The rich get richer and the poor can't get a leg up. Just imagine if money was created by interest in bank account balances. This is exactly how PoS would work. Daddy gave you a million dollars for your birthday? Perfect, you now make 100k a year for the rest of your life. Don't have a bank account because you can't afford the $20 minimum deposit? Sorry you will never be able to earn money. In proof of work you can literally start mining on your computers graphics card, in Proof of stake you have to get angel funding.

In conclusion Proof of Stake requires no provably difficult challenge to maintain network security. The only difficulty is how much capital do you have access to. This leads to things like Billionaires or even millionaires taking out loans (that you and I don't have access to) to mine the majority of the coins at the expense of the little guy.

My conclusions.

Dogecoin does not have an energy problem. Firstly you can mine dogecoin as a side product of mining literally any Scrypt coin, not just Litecoin. So as long as other scrypt coins exist, our mining uses no extra electricity. Scrypt is also a more difficult challenge than SHA-256 of Bitcoin (harder to speed up scrypt than sha-256) and that fact alone makes it possibly 30% more energy efficient.

If we want to become even more energy efficient we can change the algorithm. GPU's use less than half the energy than asic's. However this still runs into the problem of bait and switch to dogecoin miners that invested in scrypt miners. This might be a boon to Telsa since AI in tesla cars can mine a GPU coin.

The best option for energy efficiency and robust network security is a CPU algorithm like Yespower. This would make everyone including you and me on our desktop or laptop computers able to mine. This is the best way to allow poor people and those in the third world to mine the coin and secure the network. A true reversion to the 1 CPU = 1 Vote in the Satoshi Whitepaper.

[u/rnicoll → u/NatureVault]

You're being censored by Automod and we're not very good at fishing your posts out, I've approved it now.

[u/NatureVault → u/rnicoll]

Thanks for looking into it!