Boy, I really wouldn't want to work with you. The unfortunate situation to which you're referring was the result of trying to mitigate a microtransaction attack that was happening on the blockchain. It was a rock and a hard place situation, and because the community was still relatively small and focused, the devs tried to get everyone to upgrade simultaneously. They chose to risk a fork rather than risk effectively dead-ending the blockchain with dust. There was no good solution that didn't come with risks, but it certainly wasn't a result of "idiocy" as you flippantly imply.

If I were to edit this post, I could remove both the first and last sentence and it would still hold its meaning.

No, it wouldn't.

The same thing happened to bitcoin, though.

http://bitcoin.org/en/alert/2013-03-11-chain-fork

No it did not. Bitcoin has trouble because there was a parameter in Berkeley DB that nobody thought would ever be hit (the number of locks associated with a particular table). They'd tested against this and believed the value to be enough, except that in very rare cases when values outside what they thought possible caused some nodes to reject a particular block. With a portion of the network seeing the block as invalid, the consensus was broken and the chain forked.

There were test cases, peer review and discussion about the potential problems. None of those occurred with dogecoin, who had a rabid developer changing values without understanding what they did.

Which is fine, because Dogecoin is not designed to be a longterm store of value.

As far as I'm concerned, Dogecoin having more Transactions / day makes it far far more successful than BTC. BTC, despite being a better store of value, is literally affecting fewer people, because everyone is so obsessed with hoarding the dang thing.

Dogecoin takes the whole approach and makes a joke of it... and that is why it will be a perfectly fine transaction medium.

And yet there was a fork with a minor point upgrade. Did anyone see the fork happening?

Are you talking about the massive transaction that broke the chain and it forked or something else?

Yes. The author changed a value in an updated client that caused half of the network to see one chain as valid, and the other half to make scores of sub chains on the side. The value of the transaction was not the issue, but the developer not understanding how to maintain a consensus over hard forking changes.

If I am not mistaken, I think there was an emergency release because someone was flooding the blockchain with micro-transactions as an attack on dogecoin and they had to raise the transaction fee/minimum transfer.

Either with that or around that time they also had to do a patch to raise the transaction limit.

Both issues were hard to anticipate and I guess if you have to cause a fork, at least it happens while the chain was "young".

There was nothing hard to anticipate about the dogecoin fork; literally hours after the commit making it possible was made I heard from Litecoin/Bitcoin developer Warren Togami among others that the Dogecoin devs were idiots who had just set themselves up for a fork. Similarly the micro-transactions flood was something people had predicted would happen well in advance.

To outsiders this stuff may seem mysterious and hard, but to people with real experience in this field it's easy to see that the Dogecoin team don't have a clue.

I patched dogecoin to fix the transaction limit to prevent dust.

What I am realizing is that dogecoin, by virtue of being not so serious, is gaining more developer mindshare who want to experiment and learn. That's what makes it fun, and what gives it potential.

Exactly. Bitcoin is too big to experiment on, and the arguments of the hardcore-Bitcoin folks who hate altcoins are getting more and more ridiculous.

What makes you think those arguments are coming from the good Bitcoin devs/theorists? That community - I'm a part of it - thinks altcoins are valuable testing grounds for ideas and have used Litecoin for testing out new ideas in the past.

But Litecoin has the very competent Warren Togami as lead dev right now; if dogecoin had competent devs maintaining the client they'd get some respect. But they don't.

Before Charles Lee started Litecoin he created Fairbrix, a re-branded and tweaked version of Tenebrix. If you know anything about what happened to Fairbrix it is clear he was learning on the job (not a "competent dev" by your standards). Looking down your nose at Dogecoin's devs because they are still learning the codebase is pretty hypocriticial.

http://www.coindesk.com/litecoin-founder-charles-lee-on-the-...

That's why I specifically said Warren Togami - he's taken over from Charles Lee as the main driver of Litecoin development and has done an excellent job at that.

I'm pretty sure they don't want your respect. :)

"This field" "Real experience"

I think you're missing the point of dogecoin. It doesn't matter. That's the point.

Believe me, I know. I've written a few times now to the non-dogecoin communities that attacking dogecoin would just make it stronger; even a successful attack won't do anything because doge doesn't actually need to work to grow their community.

Did you or warren bother to submit a bug report? You know, what would be normal behavior with any other open source project?

It's much more useful to us to watch Dogecoin fork and get more valuable data on how forking events happen to crypto-coins.

It's a pity that Dogecoin uses such an out of date codebase - having it more up-to-date would give a nice target with real economic value and importantly transaction volume for testing out exploits. (for crypto-coins "exploits" can mean economic design issues which can't necessarily be fixed with code changes) The very short block interval makes attacks like selfish mining easier to try out for instance. Similarly because they kept the 1MB blocksize limit, but with a 10x shorter 1m interval, it gives insight into what Bitcoin would look like if the blocksize limit was raised.

Keep in mind that most people in the crypto-coin dev/theory community don't actually own that many coins, and in any case are insiders that can easily move their coins to whatever crypto-currency is most likely to grow. The smart people aren't wedded to any particular currency, but rather the growth of crypto-currencies in general. Understanding how they fail is essential to making crypto-currencies succeed in the long run.

i think he's implying that since the large transaction was on an old version of the client, and caused the fork, that the Dogecoin devs are at fault.

The large transaction was on the new version of the client, the problem was old clients couldn't handle a transaction that large (500,000,000 I think)

As opposed to the fork and "holy-hell-everyone-roll-back-quick-reverse-that-double-spend" that happened with Bitcoin?

so what you're saying is dogecoin is the php of the crypto world. we all know how that turned out.

Really, really popular and the basis for many sucessful applications?

yes, that was my point :)

Why do you hate dogecoin? Jealousy?