
Dogecoin Tutorial - kbouw
http://howtodogecoin.com/
======
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.

~~~
hnha
My advice to everyone: Existing cryptocurrencies and especially all the "i
made a coin too" are a shady, complicated and potentially completely useless
things. Consider them all schemes to lure money into the creator's wallets.
That's the whole purpose. Now make the ethical decision if you want to support
that for a chance on a questionable gain in $YourLocalRealMoney through shady
exchanges. And if you feel stressed already that you missed the opportunity to
be a fantastillionaire with bitcoin, you will probably get addicted to mining
and feel miserable overall. Do you want to feel stressed and perhaps evil for
a tiny chance of money or do you rather have a constant flow of secure
meatspace money by working?

~~~
mcantelon
>Consider them all schemes to lure money into the creator's wallets

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).

~~~
ptmx
It's effectively the same thing, except that the set of people at the top of
the pyramid is larger. It's still most lucrative for the creators, it's just
also highly rewarding for the earliest adopters.

~~~
mcantelon
How is it more lucrative for the creators than the early adopters?

~~~
ptmx
I can see how my post left room for misinterpretation; my intention was to
express that the creators are in the set {people for whom it's most
lucrative}. The earliest adopters are in the set too, obviously.

Put differently, my point is that "ethical" launches are simply good
marketing, and are quite compatible with the sentiment expressed upthread that
"[altcoins] are schemes to lure money into the creator's wallets". If a given
coin becomes popular, the creator is going to profit immensely from it whether
or not they engaged in pre-mining. By doing an "ethical" launch, they're
making it more likely that the coin gains significant adoption, albeit
probably decreasing the expected size of their payout. That seems like a smart
play, given diminishing marginal utility of money, etc.

------
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.

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

~~~
nowigetit
I guess I shouldn't be surprised to see HN jumping on the "repeating old memes
over and over and over and over again" bandwagon. So moron, wow.

------
davidw
Does it include information on the market manipulation?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7126153](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7126153)

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

~~~
anthonylebrun
It's also going to be much harder once the currency has any sort of
significant financial value. This kind of manipulation is only easily possible
at the early stages.

~~~
neals
They'd better hurry then, since all the coins will be mined soon

------
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?

~~~
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.

~~~
oelmekki
Please, do not recommend that. Online wallets are first target for scams and
hacks and should not be used.

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).

[1] [https://github.com/langerhans/dogecoin-wallet-
new](https://github.com/langerhans/dogecoin-wallet-new)

[2]
[https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin](https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin)

------
ck2
The "next" at the bottom needs to be bigger/bolder for newbies...

~~~
kbouw
updated on site

------
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash)

2: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin#Proof-of-
work_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin#Proof-of-work_system)

3: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-
work_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system)

~~~
gus_massa
An additional problem is that the rendered images will leak.

------
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

~~~
pnathan
It's OK, man. You need GPUs that aren't gossipy anyway. ;-)

------
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](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?

~~~
mkeung
there is a big tipping culture in the community, especially on reddit. in
addition to karma upvotes, people can use a tipbot to send doge to each other.
the /r/dogecoin subreddit has 40k+ subscribers, with lots of tipping in each
thread.

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.

~~~
tlrobinson
Ok, lets be generous and assume all 45,199 /r/dogecoin subscribers tip daily,
and there are 2 transactions for every tip. Each subscriber would need to tip
an average of:

$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](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...](http://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/1wd49h/huge_udogetipbot_announcement/)

\---

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.

~~~
mkeung
I haven't run any numbers (great analysis by the way). Other sources I can
think of:

-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!

~~~
tlrobinson
I did some more calculations here: [https://www.quora.com/Dogecoin/Where-is-
the-currently-massiv...](https://www.quora.com/Dogecoin/Where-is-the-
currently-massive-Dogecoin-transaction-volume-coming-from)

Notably, the volume across all exchanges today is 562,124,614 doge, which is
about $786,974, and mining accounts for another ~$1,000,000/day (500000 * 60 *
24 * $0.0014).

2x each of those to account for transactions into/out of mining pools and
exchanges, and it's still only a few million dollars (plus a lot of trading
never touches the blockchain)

~~~
mkeung
bookmarked, will keep an eye on it.

------
Swammy
I'm also building a DOGE/USD (and other currencies) exchange,
[http://doges.org/index.php?topic=4435.0](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.

~~~
lowglow
You might also have the fun time of actually getting arrested.
[http://business.time.com/2014/01/27/bitinstant-ceo-
charlie-s...](http://business.time.com/2014/01/27/bitinstant-ceo-charlie-
shrem-arrested-for-alleged-money-laundering/)

~~~
Swammy
Yeah lol I read that article, hence the emphasis on making my company as legal
as possible. There are banks in my country that will accept it, they just need
persuasion.

------
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.

~~~
dwaltrip
Sorry, I didn't mean to single you guys out individually, it was more of a
meta comment. Resources that make it easier for people to learn and do things
are always helpful :)

------
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....](http://howtodogecoin.com/images/wallet/windows/win-firewall.png)

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

~~~
mkeung
Hmmmm, you may be right...i'm not super knowledgeable on this type of thing
though. I'll update the picture, but can you give me a explanation I can use?

~~~
yebyen
The configuration is the same as Bitcoin.

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.

~~~
yebyen
(If you haven't ever looked at your .doge/config or attempted to run in daemon
mode, you won't have an RPC password and your client is also secure, since it
won't accept commands that are not authenticated.)

------
paromi
i like this info site too : [http://howtodogeco.in/](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?

~~~
kbouw
The process is the same for converting doge to USD (which I should make clear
in the guide, thanks).

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 :)

~~~
fallinghawks
YW and thanks. I'm the person who asked on reddit about converting to JPY. A
Japanese shibe and I are trying to help Atsuko Sato, the owner of the doge,
learn how to convert dogecoin donations. Since your tutorial is real clear
I'll point my Japanese friend to it to translate.

~~~
kbouw
No problem! Let me know if you have any questions on reddit (username: kbouw)

~~~
fallinghawks
Great, thanks. I'm dirthawker0.

------
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.

~~~
kbouw
Not necessary when you're going to the moon. We're talking spaceships and mars
with the dogecoin billions.

Thanks /chestbump

------
aestra
Doesn't include compiling for Linux.

~~~
mkeung
co creator of the guide here, it is on my to do list. the guide in its current
form isn't even close to complete yet, we just thought it was good enough to
start getting feedback and be useful to the average person (who probably
doesn't know Linux)

------
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?

------
adrianwaj
So when's a dogetipbot hitting HN?

------
mbloom1915
so interesting, such opportunity! wow! to the moon!

