Dogecoin Tutorial

[ambiate]

My advice to everyone: if an altcoin pops up, mine it for a day or two. Place the funds in a private wallet. Backup the wallet on a USB key and two hard drives. Do not access it for 2-3 years. Early on, farming a block takes no effort at all. Later on, if the altcoin succeeds, you hit a random lotto. Otherwise, you have a few encrypted wallets and probably wasted 15 minutes setting up the miner per altcoin. Be wary of the altcoins.

[pkfrank]

I'm honestly very interested by Dogecoin, the community enthusiasm and positivity seems to be it's wildcard. But I find the lexicon "so wow! to the moon!" et. al. just terribly grating. It honestly impacts my willingness to dive into the space.

[baddox]

Dogecoin is deliberately silly. It's based on the doge meme, after all. Have you seen the Dogecoin client? It's in Comic Sans, and includes buttons with labels like "Pls Send" and "Much Receive."

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/DwqrqLq.png

[kbouw]

The meme powers the community and drives its marketing. You'll become immune to it after a short time.

[mrkickling]

The community is really awesome. For example peoples opinions on todays price drop is that it's great because more people can buy DOGE!

[mcantelon]

"To the moon" isn't exclusive to Dogecoin. The phrase was used in the Bitcoin community before.

[herokusaki]

The grating lexicon is what kept me from getting into Dogecoin until this year even though I first ran into it no later than a few days after the initial release. As kbouw says in a sibling comment if you actively engage in the community you'll get over it pretty quickly.

[nowigetit]

It appeals to the most common demographic on the internet (idiots). As is usually the case when morons flock to something, there's money to be made from them.

I feel bad for the people who are actually putting real money in to this stupidity.

[joe_the_user]

What I want are my grumpy coins

[davidw]

Does it include information on the market manipulation?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7126153

[lvs]

These things aren't really working out terribly well for the manipulators. There's not as much panic selling as their sub-market dump needs in order to turn a profit. (All they're really doing is relinquishing their market position.) It's pretty disorganized as well.

[barce]

This is a good thing to put in there. Crypto-currencies are prey to all the manipulations of exchanges 100 years ago. Ya, that's what happens when you create unregulated virtual gold. A trader explains it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3787375

[kbouw]

I'll write a section up for this, thanks for the link and suggestion.

[minimax]

If anything that is just evidence of how thinly traded and amateurish these "markets" are.

[blakeja]

Thank you, those were my thoughts exactly when I saw the headline. Those kinds of problems lead me steer wide and clear.

[k-mcgrady]

Nice, I just started looking into Dogecoin a few days ago. It's been two days now and my wallet is still doing its first sync (about 70%). I also set up a BitCoin wallet and it looks like that'll take weeks to sync. Is this a problem people starting crypto currencies are thinking about? Is it solvable or just how they work?

[ChrisClark]

You can use a wallet like Electrum (https://electrum.org/) for Bitcoin. You don't need to download the entire blockchain then. You can be up and running in the time it takes to install it. And it is still a local wallet, so you don't have to trust an online service to store your wallet.

[SwellJoe]

I suspect that every user running a full node is going to become a bigger problem as time goes by. Newer Bitcoin clients remove the requirement by communicating with a full node somewhere in the cloud and only storing the most recent transactions (a full node hosts the entire history of the currency; every transaction ever made).

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.

[kbouw]

When you're using an offline wallet like bitcoin-qt or dogecoin-qt, you have to download the entire blockchain for the cryptocurrency. This is what's 'syncing' and can take a while to finish.

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.

[mkeung]

I mentioned in the wallet section that you can download most of the block chain in a file here: http://doge.rstreefland.com/

Hope that helps!

[ck2]

The "next" at the bottom needs to be bigger/bolder for newbies...

[kbouw]

updated on site

[anthonylebrun]

+1

[neals]

+2

[azatris]

Perhaps it's not the right thread to ask this, but:

What stops e.g. Pixar from opening up Pixarcoin where they let the community render their next movie? Am I missing something here?

[nisa]

Rendering a movie is not suitable as a proof of work function. It's probably very difficult to design a mathematical framework to verify that you really rendered the movie and not just send garbage back in exchange for coins.

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

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system

[akx]

I think one of the harder problems would be verifying that the render results from a distributed system are correct, and then Pixar would be a centralized entity doling out coin for correct output. Unless there's some decentralized way I'm blissfully missing.

[Tyr42]

How about protein folding? That actually has a way to check that it was done correctly (NP hard). Sounds really awesome.

[mrkickling]

What if people started a Pixar road, where drugs and guns would be sold for Pixar coins? Pixar would have no control over that what so ever. I don't know about the technical part however, it could probably be possible.

[Kluny]

Nothing at all. What do think you're missing?

[mitchh]

On the computer parts section on the mining page, you talk about discreet GPUs, but you probably meant discrete.

Otherwise looks great!

[mkeung]

thanks...I don't know what I was thinking haha

[anthonylebrun]

Hahahahahaha

[tlrobinson]

I'm skeptical of some of the hype around Dogecoin. The various stats sites are currently showing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Dogecoin transactions every day (http://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/sentinusd-doge.html). These are trivial to manipulate by sending transactions to yourself.

Where are all these transactions happening? Am I just out of the loop?

[Swammy]

I'm also building a DOGE/USD (and other currencies) exchange, http://doges.org/index.php?topic=4435.0 It's tough work doing it legitimately since so far most banks have turned their nose up at my business, but I'll get there.

[dwaltrip]

At the risk of sounding like a hypocrite (I own some bitcoins and have upvoted some bitcoin threads here), I am getting tired of seeing dogecoin threads. They don't seem to contain very novel or insightful information. Also, how long can the doge meme honestly keep people interested in the currency?

[mkeung]

we just wanted to get feedback on the site, like any other show hn. wasn't trying to provide novel or insightful information, other than a guide simple enough that my parents could follow.

[scottcanoni]

Regarding: "Since the wallet requires an internet connect, if you have a firewall you must allow the program access. Make sure the boxes are checked, then allow access if prompted." http://howtodogecoin.com/images/wallet/windows/win-firewall....

I don't think you should be allowing the Doge Client to run in public networks. Am I wrong?

[paromi]

i like this info site too : http://howtodogeco.in/

[fallinghawks]

Such tutorial. very wow. <--- imagine this in Comic Sans

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?

[enscr]

Where's that tutorial page on how to buy such an island & yatch with much millions you'll mint from Dogecoins. Wow, very missed.

But in all seriousness, good effort for newcomers.

[aestra]

Doesn't include compiling for Linux.

[adrianwaj]

So when's a dogetipbot hitting HN?

[mbloom1915]

so interesting, such opportunity! wow! to the moon!

[marincounty]

I just signed up ad still don't get it? I think it has something to do with communicating via email? I know one guy who spent 50 plus house setting up a "developers" site--just shut it down because of Hackers.

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.

[mkeung]

what? there is no sign up. copy paste into the wrong thread?