Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, although it does not use SHA256 as its proof of work (POW). Taking development cues from Tenebrix and Litecoin, Dogecoin currently employs a simplified variant of scrypt.
Development is ongoing and the development team as well as other volunteers can freely work in their own trees and submit pull requests when features or bug fixes are ready.
Version numbers are following ```major.minor.patch``` semantics.
#### Branches
There are 3 types of branches in this repository:
- **master:** Stable, contains the latest version of the latest *major.minor* release.
- **maintenance:** Stable, contains the latest version of previous releases, which are still under active maintenance. Format: ```<version>-maint```
- **development:** Unstable, contains new code for planned releases. Format: ```<version>-dev```
*Master and maintenance branches are exclusively mutable by release. Planned releases will always have a development branch and pull requests should be submitted against those. Maintenance branches are there for* ***bug fixes only,*** *please submit new features against the development branch with the highest version.*
Early 2015 (approximately a year and a half after release) there will be approximately 100,000,000,000 coins.
Each subsequent block will grant 10,000 coins to encourage miners to continue to secure the network and make up for lost wallets on hard drives/phones/lost encryption passwords/etc.
Dogecoin uses a simplified variant of the scrypt key derivation function as its proof of work with a target time of one minute per block and difficulty readjustment after every block. The block rewards are fixed and halve every 100,000 blocks. Starting with the 600,000th block, a permanent reward of 10,000 Dogecoin per block will be paid.
Originally, a different payout scheme was envisioned with block rewards being determined by taking the maximum reward as per the block schedule and applying the result of a Mersenne Twister pseudo-random number generator to arrive at a number between 0 and the maximum reward. This was changed, starting with block 145,000, to prevent large pools from gaming the system and mining only high reward blocks. At the same time, the difficulty retargeting was also changed from four hours to once per block (every minute), implementing an algorithm courtesy of the DigiByte Coin development team, to lessen the impact of sudden increases and decreases of network hashing rate.
The following are developer notes on how to build Dogecoin on your native platform. They are not complete guides, but include notes on the necessary libraries, compile flags, etc.