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.
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.
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.
To be fair, Bitcoin experienced a hard fork last year too.
That said, I agree Dogecoin's dev team talent is non-existent compared to Bitcoin's, but to some extent they can just copy everything Bitcoin/Litecoin does, for now.
I'm not sure it's a lack of talent but rather unfamiliarity with Litecoin/Dogecoin's code base.
Charles Lee and Sunny King, two very talented developers, both made similar mistakes when they started their coins. In Charles Lee's case, be had to scrap his first coin (Fairbrix) and start over with Litecoin.
Dogecoin uses scrypt like litecoin, but this proof of work was first used by Tenebrix. It also employs the random block reward (vs fixed for litecoin) pioneered by LotteryTickets (which includes the ongoing 10k block reward feature). I'm not exactly sure which repo it was started from, but the wallet client, namely the 1.5 release inherits all Litecoin updates since 0.6.*.
It makes mining more addictive, which increases the number of people who are willing to mine, even if the financial rewards for doing it drop. Same reason why people by lotto tickets even though it's a net economic negative.
I'd argue that the Dogecoin creators are actually quite brilliant, because they manage to exploit several known cognitive biases in humans to drive adoption. Design for the world as it actually is, not for how you would like it to be.
It is an incentive to keep around gear that can't normally pay for its electricity. Mining gear that isn't online 24/7 but can come online when the need arises is useful to counter a temporary 51% attack.
Interesting point. So miners would stay online and only mine blocks that they know would be profitable to them?
Presumably there would be a lot of such miners, which would increase competition for those more profitable blocks, which would essentially dampen out the expected value of the rewards. I wonder how the math works out.
99% of dogecoins code originates from the Bitcoin project. The other 1% is Litecoins proof of work and other random garbage including 10k block rewards at the end (originally a bug they didn't want to fix), 1 year for all coins to be generated, random rewards, 500 million transaction limit (originally a bug that they fixed and due to incompetence caused a massive fork) the security and economic implications of which likely hasn't been considered AT ALL, yet people still argue that these arbitrary changes are genius.
The reason they argue that the changes are genius is because they either have been fooled by someone with a stake in dogecoin, or have a stake in dogecoin themselves.
