Dogecoin co-founder speaks on the idea of merged mining with Litecoin

Dogecoin co-founder Jackson Palmer has now made his thoughts known on the idea of Dogecoin integrating merged mining with Litecoin — which was initially proposed by Litecoin creator Charlie Lee.

The idea was proposed as a way to secure Dogecoin’s future as we approach the widespread availability of dedicated mining machines or ASICs. Palmer, however, doesn’t seem to feel that the proposal would be the right thing at this moment in time. He says that it’s not really needed until the coin reaches static block rewards, that it shouldn’t be “pegged to another community”, and that the idea isn’t great for miners themselves either:

Right now, merged mining with Litecoin wouldn’t really benefit Dogecoin. It’d just force all the dedicated, passionate Dogecoin mining pools out there to shift over to also mining Litecoin to reap their deserved rewards, which they may not want to do. On top of that, it’s fair to assume that Litecoin miners who come in will likely auto-dump the Dogecoin they’re rewarded, which isn’t necessarily great for the stability of Dogecoin as a currency and no better than what multi-pools are doing today.

Instead he actually suggests that if the coin were to merge with another, it could be better to do so with one of the smaller altcoins over Litecoin, suggesting Digibyte as one that stands out to him personally:

I’d actually propose this: Let’s work with other, smaller scrypt-based altcoins such as DigiByte to help them merged mine off Dogecoin as the parent blockchain. This helps secure all of our networks into the future (altcoins with lower hashrates are subject to frequent attacks), and I personally love seeing us crypto under-doges working together (DigiByte devs helping with us implementing DigiShield is a fantastic example of this). Just like Dogecoin, there’s no telling what the future of Litecoin holds either - so maybe they’ll want to merge mine off Dogecoin as the parent chain some day.

Litecoin creator Charlie Lee entered into the thread to publicly share his response to Palmer’s thoughts:

Fair enough. I would recommend revisiting this at each halving. Doge has a unique design that, some believe (me included), doesn’t work well with mining. Satoshi made mining last many many years before transaction fees take over. This is because he knew that it’s not sustainable otherwise. Doge has to succeed or die in 1 year. It’s too short of a time. You will need to be THE dominant crypto in your mining class in order to survive this. So the solution is either merged mining or switch to another algorithm. To me, it’s pretty clear. BUT, I won’t bet against Doge overcoming this. So it is possible that you can overcome this, but it means that you need to defeat Litecoin (in market cap and hashrate) within a year. I obviously don’t expect to see that happen.

It’s certainly a very interesting proposition, although it seems the coins’ communities remain somewhat divided by the idea. Personally I’d like to see Dogecoin remain as is for now, if for no other reason than to see what happens as it approaches its final reward halving.

Will definitely be an interesting story to follow, and I wonder if the big discussion may lead to other coins proposing to merge their mining with one another in the future.

Source: Reddit