It was almost midnight on a quiet Thursday in London last week. Software engineer and part-time Dogecoin developer Ross Nicoll was putting on pajamas and getting ready to sleep, when his feedback suddenly became active.
Elon Musk, arguably the most influential person on Twitter (on cryptocurrency Twitter of course), mentioned Nicoll and the other three core developers responsible for the Dogecoin blockchain on Twitter. "We are working with Doge developers to improve system transaction efficiency," said the founder of Tesla and SpaceX. "It may be very promising."
"I was stunned," Nicoll told Decrypt in the Zoom video the next day. "He never told us he wanted to do this."
Since Musk entered his life two years ago, Nicoll feels like the story of the surreal science fiction drama "Black Mirror" happened to him, and his excitement is beyond words. Musk's eagerness to make Dogecoin the most widely used cryptocurrency in the world is clear at a glance.
From the outside world, until last week, Musk was the savior of the Bitcoin world. After Tesla bought Bitcoin for $1.5 billion earlier this year, he became the world’s first cryptocurrency. People to the mainstream. Of course, Musk also likes to talk about Dogecoin on Twitter. But just to be funny, hope so. At least, Bitcoin supporters and many in the industry have told themselves so. Even Musk himself said that his Dogecoin tweets were "just for fun."
However, last week, the former Bitcoin anti-handler and Tesla's helm turned gorgeously in an Alice in Wonderland-style fairy tale that only Musk can plan. He announced that although Tesla will continue to hold Bitcoin, it will no longer accept Bitcoin as a means of payment due to environmental issues, and he is looking for more environmentally friendly alternatives. This move caused Bitcoin to plummet by 30% in the past week.
"We were taken aback by the news that he announced that he would give up Bitcoin," Nicole said. "But I'm really curious, what will happen to this?"
Until now, Musk’s involvement in the Dogecoin project has been a secret, even though his tweets have caused Dogecoin to soar by 10,000% since 2021.
Musk first mentioned this project on Twitter in 2019. At that time, he was invited to be the honorary CEO of Dogecoin and accepted this role. After the founder of the 2015 Scoin abandoned it, the community Depressed part of the time.
Since then, the five developers of Dogecoin, Nicoll, Michi Lumin, Max Keller, Patrick Lodder, and "Sporklin" (unfortunately, he died of cancer in April) have been working on this open source project in his spare time.
Before Musk tweeted, few people in cryptocurrency knew that this Tesla CEO took advantage of the "Dogecoin Honorary CEO" to start sending private messages to developers on his private Twitter account. Said to voluntarily fund them (but the developers politely rejected the proposal), but the seeds have germinated and it is now possible to disrupt the cryptocurrency industry.
Nicoll said that Musk "will send messages from time to time." Whenever he did this, he would plunge the developer into "ecstasy".
Decrypt learned in a public information that Dogecoin developers rejected Elon Musk’s funding, but hoped that Musk would make Dogecoin a more environmentally friendly and cheaper alternative to Bitcoin.
Many people asked how Musk could not see the absurdity of Dogecoin. This currency was a joke at the beginning. It runs on the most basic borrowed code and has not been developed on GitHub for many years. Critics of Dogecoin pointed out that the GitHub page is deserted, which makes people really doubt whether there are real Dogecoin developers.
Nicoll's response is that he believes that it is meaningless to "work hard just to develop hard", especially when the upgrade of Dogecoin may take up to 18 months to be adopted by the network. Then why do developers need to upgrade frequently? This is not reasonable at all.
The most absurd and incredible rise of Dogecoin that happened on April Fool's Day seems to be very much in line with this joke of cryptocurrency. Earlier this year, Dogecoin's sales in China reached 1 billion.
Nicoll joined the cryptocurrency industry after working in academia for 10 years as a focus on application development. Until recently, he led the technical development of smart contracts for the enterprise blockchain project R3, working closely with commercial banks. He also had a short working experience on the NFT project CryptoKitties.
His method reflects his background in commercial blockchain development. Like some blockchain projects, it is indeed a waste to release new upgrades every three months.
"We are not the kind of developers who think about a lot of financing and get rich overnight," he said. "We are not going to reinvent the other 3000 blockchain technologies that have been reinvented. I really don't understand the reason for this?"
Dogecoin is modeled on Bitcoin, but like Litecoin, it uses a different code, Scrypt, which is less energy-intensive and is more in line with Musk’s new and more environmentally friendly social media stance on cryptocurrencies.
The network does currently have "network synchronization performance problems", Nicoll said, this will be remedied in the upcoming upgrade, which aims to lay the foundation for many upcoming comprehensive transformations, and some of these changes have been encouraged by Musk. .
Nicoll appeared in a talkative and down-to-earth image. He didn't want to disclose too much of his conversation with Musk, but he was open to Musk's main goal: to make Dogecoin cheap enough to buy a cup of coffee.
"Elon obviously has a background in payment processing," Nicole said. "We are listening to his advice to see what it will look like."
Based on his knowledge as the founder of PayPal, Musk provided many suggestions to developers on how to turn Dogecoin from a joke into a real practical tool. "I can honestly say that he greatly improved the transaction throughput problem." Nicoll said.
"He went straight to the final goal," Nicoll mentioned. "He went back to the question of buying coffee, and we were saying,'Your idea is good, but we need to develop a path from A to Z, so this is not the next step to consider.' So we are now away from the real Announcing this plan is still far away."
The developers and Musk also discussed ways to reduce Dogecoin's carbon footprint, and they are "still evaluating." Nicoll said that there is still "a lot of modeling" to do before major decisions are made.
Although Musk's plan is exciting for developers, Nicoll said that they need to solve more real problems in the network first. But the Dogecoin development team is still optimistic that with the addition of Musk, they can further reduce the energy consumption of cryptocurrencies. According to an estimate on Thursday, Dogecoin's energy consumption is only 7% of Bitcoin.
"As the Dogecoin market heats up, Nicoll said that the interest in developing the coin has risen to its apex." He said: "We see a large number of developers joining and doing this work. What's interesting is that other developers Shang began to call himself a "core team", such as a company that recently appeared in New York. But this is very exciting, and I hope to see more development teams jump into this field and do something together."
So far, the people engaged in the development of Dogecoin are basically part-timers.
"I coded Dogecoin at my table," Nicoll said. "I would love to see more projects appear and allow more people to work full-time in this field. It makes sense. But it won't be I."
Dogecoin said that Dogecoin does not need a senior technical leader anyway. "We need a lot of people to code on site, we need someone who is more like a CTO, and I am neither." The most important thing is that he can get a better salary outside of the blockchain field, although he refuses Reveal the location.
He also questioned how a project can claim to be completely decentralized if it relies on a few core contributors. "We hope that there will be 100 or 200 or 1000 small contributors on top of the three or four main contributors. This is decentralization," he said. "They looked at us as if we were crazy, but it made sense to me."
With this goal in mind, Nicoll has been broadcasting his coding work on Twitch to train the next generation of Dogecoin developers. Nicoll hopes to see developers working on the long-awaited "Dogethereum Bridge" and other projects, as well as decentralized finance (DeFi) projects, introducing smart contracts into DOGE.
Moreover, because the price of DOGE is very healthy, there are sufficient funds in the small vault of the development team. The core team "is currently establishing a framework and guidelines, but still need to consider the scale of the construction and how they will be used," Nicoll said. But after rejecting the funds from Musk and other wealthy potential investors (Nicoll would not disclose their names, but he said they rejected the funds to avoid being controlled by someone), they believed that the specific funding needs should be determined. Before the plan, further financing is meaningless.
One month before Nicoll started his new job, he was laying the foundation for the 1.21 upgrade of Dogecoin, which is the biggest upgrade since 2019 and the basis for all future changes.
This upgrade is based on Bitcoin, and Nicoll attributes this work to the core developers of Bitcoin 0.21. "We are really trying to get as close as possible to Bitcoin, so it is so practical," he said.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk continued to give pointers on Twitter. In response to a tweet that equated Bitcoin with Dogecoin, he said that if there is a major change in the network, this meme coin will beat Bitcoin.
After the upgrade, the team's next goal is to reduce transaction fees from the current average of $0.4 to $0.01. "The community will have a negotiation with the miners. We have to convince them, because doing so is healthy for the development of the network," Nicoll said.
"From the end user's point of view, synchronization speed is the most important thing," he explained. This upgrade will also ensure that wallet backups are always valid and make it easier for service providers to integrate Dogecoin.
Last week, after shirking for a long time, the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase finally announced the listing of Dogecoin. The six to eight-week timetable shared by the exchange suggests that new upgrades may be ready before listing. According to Nicoll, it will allow any exchange or payment processor that can integrate Bitcoin to work with Dogecoin, but "ten times faster."
The listing of Dogecoin on Coinbase is a product of popular demand. Since Musk included DOGE under his command, Dogecoin's Google search volume has been comparable to Bitcoin's search volume, which provides a solid foundation for the next step of widespread adoption. Moreover, Musk's influence on the crypto industry shows no signs of abating.
When asked about the competition between Bitcoin and Dogecoin, Nicole was quite humble. "In the blockchain industry, everyone thinks that they must reinvent the wheel, and must innovate more than they do. But I hope very much. Seeing that as many blockchain organizations as possible can cooperate rather than compete. In the end, let us form a real wave, pushing all ships to far away."
Sporklin was a woman. May she rest in peace and please correct the article in your mention to her at the beginning of your otherwise very fine piece!