Dogecoin and the Appeal of Small Numbers • Hacker News Board

Re: Dogecoin and the Appeal of Small Numbers

#101

Post by melarina » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 4:28 AM UTC

petertodd wrote: post #96

singularityyy wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

Re: Dogecoin and the Appeal of Small Numbers

#102

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 4:37 AM UTC

ck2 wrote: post #18

It's not just the number of coins. The people who created this were not idiots, they learned by looking at previous coins. 1. more coins for larger transactions instead of fractions 2. faster block rate (one a minute) 3. faster difficulty adjustment time (4 hours vs days or weeks) 4. faster halving time (every other month or so) 5. faster time to last block (mid 2015) 6. faster confirmations The random payout on a bl…

[deleted]

Re: Dogecoin and the Appeal of Small Numbers

#103

Post by MartinCron » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 4:44 AM UTC

aresant wrote: post #57

Just a random comment on the whole "community raised 25k" In fact one self identifying bitcoin speculator contributed $20k of that after moving some bc>doge all to drive speculative in doge through the assured free press (and wrote about his intent on reddit).

That seems like the sort of market manipulation that you used to be able to do in equity markets before the SEC stepped in and at least made it difficult.

I wonder how common this is, or will become.

Re: Dogecoin and the Appeal of Small Numbers

#104

Post by MartinCron » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 4:45 AM UTC

bitops wrote: post #54

steveklabnik wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more that short posts that consist entirely of cultural references for the purpose of making a joke are downvoted. Generally.

That's the thing - my karma is high enough that I know what not to post. Generally speaking. Every once in a while though, I get tired of pretending that I don't also have a goofy sense of humor and stuff like this slips through. Oh well.

Humor is risky, sometimes it will flop, sometimes it will be greatly appreciated.

I think you need to do a little more than just plug cultural references, though.

Re: Dogecoin and the Appeal of Small Numbers

#105

Post by brokenparser » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 5:22 AM UTC

krisgee wrote: post #9

It's 100% attitude. Doge is fun and playful while bitcoin seems to be the domain of crazy libertarians and people who just want to be the new bank.

crazy libertarians? How so?

Re: Dogecoin and the Appeal of Small Numbers

#106

Post by lvs » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 5:28 AM UTC

alttab wrote: post #92

lvs wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Dogecoin and the Appeal of Small Numbers

#107

Post by woah » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 6:09 AM UTC

brokenparser wrote: post #105

krisgee wrote: post #9

It's 100% attitude. Doge is fun and playful while bitcoin seems to be the domain of crazy libertarians and people who just want to be the new bank.

crazy libertarians? How so?

It's like he doesn't realize that libertarianism is the one true choice that any rational being would make.

Re: Dogecoin and the Appeal of Small Numbers

#108

Post by natmaster » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 6:09 AM UTC

aresant wrote: post #57

Just a random comment on the whole "community raised 25k" In fact one self identifying bitcoin speculator contributed $20k of that after moving some bc>doge all to drive speculative in doge through the assured free press (and wrote about his intent on reddit).

$20,000 is free now? Please give me $20,000 then - it won't cost you a thing.

Re: Dogecoin and the Appeal of Small Numbers

#109

Post by petertodd » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 6:30 AM UTC

melarina wrote: post #101

petertodd wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Dogecoin and the Appeal of Small Numbers

#110

Post by petertodd » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 6:42 AM UTC

melarina wrote: post #97

petertodd wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.