Dogecoin Development
r/dogecoindev
Hopefully you have heard of Ordinals Bitcoin NFT's by now, some like the idea of NFT's on Bitcoin and some don't like it.
I am in neither of those two camps, I have seen from the outset that this is a existential threat to bitcoin. Whether you like the idea of NFT's on bitcoin or not is a false dichotomy in this situation.
Why? Because Bitcoin has committed itself to never scaling their blockchain. I have been monitoring bitcoin's blockchain using https://mempool.space/ for several months. Usually their blockchain is backed up ~30 blocks is common. Now I check it and it is backed up around 200mb or the typical equivalent of 200 blocks (since ordinals are using full 4mb capacity, this is less than 200 blocks now). Even at just 100 blocks backed up, that is 1000 minutes before your first confirmation for your transaction! And this is when there is almost no price action, when the price action goes up this congestion will be worse, much worse. Bitcoin will become unusable for anyone except gigachads (Elon predicted it lol), which is where this leads. You can track ordinals effecting blocks here: https://dune.com/dataalways/ordinals
How can bitcoin fix it? Hard fork and remove Taproot, and probably segwit while they are at it (segwit is also vulnerable to this exploit). Replace it with a blocksize scaling schedule which would obsolete bitcoin cash, which should be a win-win for bitcoiners.
What can we learn from this? Firstly that Dogecoin shouldn't follow bitcoin very closely if at all (barring security updates that effect our code which usually we should probably follow bitcoin on). Secondly we learn that softforks are usually bad. If you are doing a softfork you are in essence doing a hack to get around the need to do a hardfork. If the softfork has a vulnerability like this, you have to hardfork in order to fix it. So you may as well have just done a hardfork from the beginning to make a good change with minimal workarounds and feature bloat to the code.
This effects us right now see https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/discussions/2264 where the dogecoin devs are proposing 1.21 as a softfork upgrade. Not only do softforks in general have the risks I just mentioned, but the devs are intending to introduce segwit either in 1.21 or subsequently. Segwit can and will be gamed just like taproot has been. IMO we need to set dogecoin on a straightforward path of casting aside segwit and lightning and pursuing transaction throughput by reducing blocktime and increasing blocksize. Let the devs know how you feel about segwit and following bitcoin's (risky) development path in general, in the github link above.