And of course I've chosen my most promising and recent work. The mining of Dogecoin!!!
I came across the dogecoin subreddit www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin on Dec.12 and it caught my attention. I'd missed out on most other crypto-currencies and this one seemed like a fun way to play around and learn more about how they work before solo-mining blocks became impossible (like Bitcoin).
So after downloading the latest Dogecoin wallet (at the time dogecoin-qt-v10) and configuring the .conf file and syncing I set about collecting doge. At first I got 10 Doge from a faucet and did some minor trading to confirm that sending and receiving worked. Which was awesome! But I still wanted to solo mine.
Since dogecoin uses scrypt to discourage mining using custom hardware like ASICs I downloaded cgminer 3.7.2 (newer versions don't support scrypt) and set up solo mining using a .bat file with the following settings:
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 95
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
cgminer --scrypt -o http://127.0.0.1:22555 -u doge -p wow 2>logfile.txt -I 17 -g 1 -w 256 --thread-concurrency 8192
Luckily I have a Sapphire 7850 GPU so I was able to squeeze 230-310kH/s out of it depending on the intensity setting (-I). After turning up all my fans to control the temp I left it to run overnight. Luckily, with the network difficulty being around 6 at that time I actually managed to solve a block which payed out 730,000 Doges. wow!
I continued to solo-mine for a day or two after that but unfortunately difficulty had gone up and my chances of solving a block had significantly decreased. So rather than cease mining I joined a pool. Specifically, doge.pool.webxass.de. This required making an account, seeting up a worker and slightly tweaking my cgminer settings. During this time, lots of doge pools experienced instability as they struggled to deal with demand.
Luckily my pool owner managed a successful server migration and despite some downtime and confusion, avoided any major catastrophes like stolen doge or lost data. *Cough* Poolerino *Cough* Gentoomen... In this pool I managed to consistently mine for doge at a rate of around 25k doges per day until I reached around 100k doges mined. such rich!
Today bitcoin and most other crypto-currencies experienced severe dives in value. Yet dogecoin stands strong, a lone wolf.
Personally I doubt that bitcoin or any other currency without the backing of some kind of organization, be it formal (like a government) or informal (like a web community) will survive. As the oldest crypto-currency, Bitcoin has many supporters, but they are also very divided.
While I dream of dogecoin making me rich I think a more likely success story is that it lives on in the online community as a method of paying for favours, original content, and steam games. In this way, doge can remain outside the realm of government interference, which has proven to be disastrous to the stability of bitcoin. A strong community could prove to be a key contributer towards the longevity of a currency. And so far the the Dogecoin community has been a supportive and generous group of shibes. To the stars!
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