Some launches, like Dogecoin's, are done ethically with no pre-mining. Look at the coin creator's launch plan and if they violate (as the recent Coinye coin did) take them to task for it (Coiye crashed and burned).
Ignoring the "evil" bit, this sounds like a false dilemma. Running a mining "rig" is not a full-time job; the people I've talked to who are into mining treat it as either a hobby or a passive income-type side project.
Not to mention that your computer is unusable while it's mining. My point being, it's not a get rich quick scheme for everyone.
Depends on your computer. I mine 42 coin and code/watch movies and there's no noticeable performance hit other than my computer being warmer than usual.
If you must have the coins in anticipation of their rise, just buy thousands for them for a few dollars.
No gaming probably though.
You can point your miner at their pool, and an algorithm decides which coin you mine at any given moment based on profitablity.
They have a pool for scrypt & SHA256 miners.
edit : use a multipool which mines for the most profitable coin.
Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/DwqrqLq.png
I feel bad for the people who are actually putting real money in to this stupidity.
What stops e.g. Pixar from opening up Pixarcoin where they let the community render their next movie? Am I missing something here?
At the moment most Coins use either one or multiple hashing functions¹ or prime chains² as proof of work system³.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin#Proof-of-work_system
Dogecoin has tremendous transaction volume, second only to Bitcoin some days, because of it's tipping culture. So, it's probably more urgent that solutions to the full-node problem get solved for more popular altcoins like Doge than for the less used ones.
You can bypass having to download the blockchain by using an online wallet instead, which solves that specific pain point but they're less secure than your local storage offline wallet.
If you browse /r/dogecoin, you will see that everyone is recommending to stay away from them. They were especially hit by the dogewallet.com hack.
An alternative is using the android wallet. It's been around for some weeks, now, and I didn't see any complains about it. It relies on no central server and it's code is opensource [1], so it can hardly be a scam, I think.
I remember reading something by its author saying that it won't download the whole chain. From my experience, it's faster to sync than qt client, so I suppose it's true. Also, some neat options like disabling sync when not charging and/or not connected to wifi, which make power / bandwidth consumption not a problem.
Anyway, the only official wallet is the qt / cli one [2]. If you want to be safe, it's the one to use. The sync thing may be annoying at first, but it's easily dealt with if you open your wallet once a day, or once in two days (it will take something like five minutes to sync).
Hope that helps!
I don't think you should be allowing the Doge Client to run in public networks. Am I wrong?
The Dogecoin client is based off the Litecoin client. The Litecoin client is based off the official Bitcoin client.
Odds are, if a remotely exploitable bug is present in Dogecoin's network service, it will probably be present in Bitcoin's too, and every altcoin that is a direct fork of Bitcoin.
Cryptocurrencies require you to establish P2P connections with other people on the Internet, so if you want the network to thrive you do have to run it on a public network. There is always going to be a risk with any service you run, but Bitcoin's code has been audited by security professionals on quite a few occasions, so the chances of a critical bug that can be remotely exploited against someone simply running the client are fairly low. There's probably a higher chance of there being a critical bug in uTorrent.
Basically, the Dogecoin wallet is going to attempt to punch a hole in your firewall with UPnP and any other NAT-busting techniques the author (of Bitcoin) has contrived to enable you to help new nodes to come to sync by sending them blocks from the winning blockchain.
The daemon mode (which listens on an RPC/HTTP port for commands like "send money here") is not going to attempt to run unless you enable a password in your .doge/config (just like bitcoind). RPC clients will need this password to be able to issue commands. If you have one node, then both the client and server will have the same .doge/config and it's secure, assuming they don't guess your password. If you have multiple nodes, this is the way to have a lightweight client that sends commands to your "heavyweight" wallet. If the client doesn't have your RPC password, the client can't do anything that any 'nobody' new node on the network should be able to do.
You can run Dogecoin on public networks, or the Dogecoin wallet has a bug that you should report. Whether it's wise to be in a position to be the first to discover such a bug (by losing all the coins in your wallet), that's another matter, but if there are such bugs in the wallet then it's really not viable, and you should therefore probably sell all your doges immediately.
Where are all these transactions happening? Am I just out of the loop?
additionally, it may be that each transaction is counted multiple times. if I were to tip you, I would first send funds to the bot, who then sends funds to you.
$427,079,860 / 2 / 45,199 = $4724.44
Not likely, IMHO, even if each tip required 10 or 100 transactions.
Most tips seem to be less than a dollar. http://www.reddit.com/user/dogetipbot
It just doesn't add up. Where else is Dogecoin being used?
EDIT: some actual numbers are available here http://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/1wd49h/huge_udoget...
---
On January 26th:
- 7,258 inbox messages were read by dogetipbot (even more were sent and were still unread at the time -- backlog).
- 4,565 tips were given.
- 572 new users registered for their first time.
- 359 shibes withdrew some dogecoins
- 743 shibes still kept sending +info requests even though i turned them off. ;)
- 1,063,466.73376456 dogecoins were tipped.
---
1,063,466.73376456 dogecoins = $1488.85 USD (using current exchange rate of 1 doge =US$0.0014)
There you have it. ~$1500 worth of Dogecoin was tipped on the /r/dogecoin subreddit on Jan 26, while $240M worth of Dogecoin transactions took place.
-conversion from other currency holdings (LTC, BTC), which some people have openly said they did
-recent run up / down of the value caused a lot of people who were previously holding to buy / sell (started around the time of the big news push with the Jamaican bobsled team fundraiser, right now it is dropping)
-general interest, people buying some amount to hold for the first time. i have had friends making their first crypto purchase in doge recently, who don't understand the technology and probably shouldn't (due to the news i think and not wanting to miss out on bitcoin 2.0)
-Chinese investors getting in / out? i think i saw a graph of cny to doge being a major part of the transactions
personally, i haven't looked into it that seriously because i haven't invested seriously. i put time in (especially for the site content), but all my coins are mined from an existing gaming computer. my total doge USD value is ~$50, which is probably lower than what people would expect of the dogecointutorial creator. my doge mining actually started because I wanted to cheaply explore how cryptocurrencies worked. then the tutorial site actually started when i was testing out aws / github pages for landing page hosting. originally i just had some sort of dogecoin index placeholder but found myself jumping around / searching for info as i learned about doge and cryptocurrencies...so i started my own guide. if you do more research, do share it!
Otherwise looks great!
How dissimilar is the process for converting dogecoin to normal-people money? (I have no interest in Bitcoin except as a necessary stepping stone.) If very different, could you make a page for this?
There are a few exchanges with plans to offer direct exchange from Doge to USD in the coming weeks, which I will also be making a guide for when it's released.
You could alternatively sell your Doge for USD through a service like eBay and add a nice markup for convenience (doge is selling for 2x the value in some bids), although you chance dealing with scammers.
edit* thanks for the props, specifically in comic sans :)
But in all seriousness, good effort for newcomers.
Thanks /chestbump
I think I go pan for gold, but won't dredge because of fish eggs. Or, apply to McDonalds? Or, boom? No, I'll go back to my f--ng website.
