It’s no secret that Dogecoin has been struggling to survive for the past few months, with hash rates steadily declining and miners leaving in droves to concentrate their efforts on more profitable coins.
Developers have been weighing various proposed solutions and announced today that they will soon enable the Dogecoin blockchain to accept an auxilliary proof-of-work (AuxPoW). This will allow the cryptocurrency to accept work from other Scrypt coins, particularly Litecoin, in what is referred to as merged mining. A fork will be necessary to complete the implementation.
The merged mining will be available for any coin that has a higher difficulty than Dogecoin, but as of now only Litecoin meets that criteria.
No specific date has been set for the implementation, but one of Dogecoin’s core developers, who goes by the username of Langer Hans, said that the new code is in the late testing phase and will go into effect “sooner rather than later.”
Hans wrote the following in his announcement to the Dogecoin subreddit:
“We have also discussed many other options, some of them which are still highly theoretical, or just deemed to be in Alpha state. We didn’t see them as viable for that exact reason. AuxPoW has been around in the crypto space for quite a while now. Our topmost priority has always been to provide a stable platform for the currency and its services and of course its users. We hope that with AuxPoW we can achieve that in a better way than what it currently is like. Our hashrate has been on a decline and we hope that we can gain more of it with the acceptance of proof of work from other chains.”
Hans notes that this doesn’t mean that Dogecoin and Litecoin are tied together.
“What this does not mean is that we’re tying us to Litecoin. What we do is accepting Proof of Work from their miners if they happen to hit our difficulty target. But that is technical background stuff, which was explained several times before here. On that note, and I’m no economist, I also don’t see that have any negative effect on the price, considering the amount of “dumped” coins would probably not change. Also, you as miners are not forced to mine Litecoin to get Dogecoin now. You can still mine at your current pools directly to the Dogecoin network.”
What does this AuxPoW implementation mean for the future of Dogecoin – the coin that was apparently “built to die quickly”?
No one can say for sure, but CCN writer Clay Gillespie speculates on a few possibilities:
1) AuxPoW could increase Dogecoin exchange sales, which would lower its value.
2) Dogecoin could be viewed as a safer investment, resulting in reinforced confidence in the coin, which would likely lead to an increase in buy orders.
3) Or nothing could change in the price, which would result in Dogecoin remaining secure for longer than intended.
