[tjstebbing]

I'm the Product Lead at the Dogecoin Foundation, that amusing dog-themed crypto project that unlike others remembers the OG vision of crypto: being a useful decentralised currency for folk to spend world over (not just a store of value that magically goes up all the time, or a general purpose distributed compute platform).

A major reason I'm involved in crypto at all is that I believe cryptocurrency is a Pandora's box that Satoshi unleashed on the world. It doesn't matter whether you love or hate crypto, it's not going back in the box, it will (in some form) be what we're using in 10-20 years for everything. This is what you're seeing with the Biden announcement that the US are investigating CBDCs. China already has one, governments the world over are looking at this and rubbing their hands together.

The choice we have now is to decide whether our kids enjoy a decentralised currency in a form that cannot be taken away from them, that fundamentally belongs to the people, or centralised currency that yields 100% control to their government to suspend, redistribute, withhold and track to a degree never before imagined.

There's a mighty big carrot in single-government CBDCs that is going to take a significant, unified effort to resist. The only way that I see of avoiding it is to establish a global, grass-roots financial product that wins bottom-up by being easier, simpler, more convenient.. so that's what we're trying to do.

[randomhodler84]

Totally! Love Dogecoin, still have a few mined from the fun times! The mission of Dogecoin has always been about providing a transactional and decentralized payment system and it has done this flawlessly for years! Wow!

Dogecoin is poised to offer a cute alternative to CBDCs. It’s very fast, cheap and the blockchain could fit in most of the worlds cellphones today, but SPV lite wallets work fine too!

Can I recommend that Dogecoin looks to its parent, LTC, and implements mimblewimble too? Shibas deserve privacy too!!

[kragen]

Litecoin is implementing Mimblewimble?

[randomhodler84]

Implemented!!!! Signaling has begun, it should activate on main net in the next few months. David Burkett of grin++ implemented mw extension blocks as an opaque mw side chain. I think this is a good model in that exchanges can operate in pure transparent taproot LTC (which is also signally and should go live soon), or mweb chain. I think in practice it will behave more like zcash with most of the coin remaining transparent side but those that wish to tie their tongues if they dare.

[kragen]

Oh wow, that's a huge development. For those who don't know Mimblewimble (assuming it works!) allows running a full node on something as small as a microcontroller and utterly eliminates transaction traceability.

[tromp]

Mimblewimble itself doesn't eliminate transaction traceability, since the transaction graph is almost entirely visible in the mempool. But Mimblewimble can be augmented with something like [1] which does mostly eliminate transaction traceability if widely deployed.

[1] https://forum.grin.mw/t/mimblewimble-coinswap-proposal

[randomhodler84]

Thank you for sharing tromp, this looks great!

[randomhodler84]

It’s probably going to require a little more grunt, it’s also a LTC full node and must process that 70GB chain, but mw itself is very lightweight. What it enables is fungibility to the LTC token, where moving between transparent and opaque chains will Smush the coin history, balance and transaction graph. I do agree it’s a big deal, and if it works we can look at deploying it to.. other satoshi client coins. One day, mw on Bitcoin. It’s important because LTC is a deep production environment worth billions of dollars. People were afraid of segwit — people were making up lies about safety and the dudes that implemented it are true math rockstars. When it worked — of course — on a real value chain like LTC, people were more comfortable using sats on it. I hope mw gains acceptance. Truly ground breaking stuff.

[matheusmoreira]

> a decentralised currency in a form that cannot be taken away from them, that fundamentally belongs to the people

This is what I want. I'm not sure dogecoin has these properties. I think monero is closest.

[tjstebbing]

Dogecoin is a 100% opensource project, with a decentralised yet coordinated development effort that's pushing toward these goals, check out the Dogecoin manifesto https://foundation.dogecoin.com/manifesto/ and the 'trailmap' of projects on the same site if you'd like to know why we think we have those properties :)

[kragen]

Right, but it has Bitcoin's transaction traceability, which potentially limits fungibility and consequently security against confiscation.

[tjstebbing]

That's true, and the way people use addresses plays a big part in traceability as well. There's honestly a lot of work to do to bring better practices into the mainstream, for instance HD addresses allow you to generate child addresses for every transaction, yet most folk hold their crypto on an exchange with a single address for all transactions. The industry needs to focus on security-usability and education, and we're starting to see that as new wallet apps are developed with the user (rather than profit motive of exchanges) in mind.

[olalonde]

Shitcoins like Dogecoin are harming this vision, not helping it.