Dogecoin is an open-source project, meaning that anyone with some technical know-how can contribute to Dogecoin’s technical development. Even if you’re new to the space, it’s never too late to learn new tricks!

Dogecoin has an amazing team of developers and volunteers who are committed to welcoming new people into the space and helping them to learn and develop their skills. The community is extremely encouraging, too, and it’s very common to see old Shibes helping new Shibes as they enter the space.

Dogecoin has many projects through which you can help: Core, Libdogecoin, Gigawallet, Documentation, and websites to name but a few. As emphasised by the Dogecoin Foundation’s Timothy Stebbing: YOU can be a Dogecoin Dev just by picking-up your metaphorical shovel! Opensource communities are meritocracies: the more you do, the more you’re respected and the more you can be the change you want to see!

The Dogecoin developers are passionate about growing the space through which people can BUIDL the Dogecoin ecosystem. To this end, one of the key objectives behind Libdogecoin is to create bindings for many languages so that Dogecoin is more accessible to a broader developer audience.

If you would like to contribute to Dogecoin technical development and become a Dogecoin developer, check-out the Dogecoin Core and The Dogecoin Foundation GitHub repositories and get involved!

Mining pools are services, operated by third parties not affiliated with Dogecoin, which allow a group of miners to combine their hashing power when attempting to solve the “puzzles” involved in mining Dogecoin.

Mining rewards - consisting of 10,000 Dogecoin per block plus transaction fees associated to the transactions included in the block - are awarded to the miner who discovers a valid Proof of Work for a new block before any other miner in the network. Anyhow, alone, a miner has a very limited hashing power in relation to the overall Mining Hashrate of the network. This means a miner, even when using a powerful ASIC miner, has a small chance at being awarded the next block. In practice, it could take a long time before a solo miner finds a block and is awarded the rewards associated with it.

By joining their efforts with other miners in a mining pool, which coordinates their work and distributes the rewards following pre-established rules the miners have agreed to, miners earn a steadier flow of Dogecoin. Even though they get awarded only a portion of the overall block reward, over a long period of time, mining in a pool allows a miner to earn a more predictable and usually higher amount of Dogecoin.

Mining Pools and Rewards

When mining in a pool, miners agree to accept the rules defined by the pool for the distribution of the rewards.

In general, the operators of the mining pool will keep for themselves a percentage of the mining rewards. The rest of the rewards are usually distributed to the miners depending on the amount of shares they have accumulated when mining a block. A miner is awarded shares depending on the amount of computational work it has contributed to the mining pool’s efforts.

Importance and Influence of Mining Pools

Mining pools contribute most of the hashing power of the Dogecoin network. For this reason, due to the fundamental role that mining plays in a Proof of Work crypto like Dogecoin, they hold considerable power and influence.

Developers, node operators, and Dogecoin users are the other forces exercising influence on the network, and should, in general, balance out and keep in check the influence of mining pools and miners. Single miners can also opt to mine in smaller mining pools, instead of joining the largest and most popular pools.

Magic and memes! (Just kidding. Kind of.)

First things first: Dogecoin is money.

Like other popular cryptocurrencies, Dogecoin works by utilising blockchain technology. Unlike a lot of other popular cryptocurrencies, though, the fees to send Dogecoin are extremely small, and the speed by which Dogecoin transactions are confirmed is relatively fast.

Simply put, if you would like to send money to someone who is located anywhere in the world — or receive money from someone who is located anywhere in the world — without using a centralised bank and paying foreign currency exchange and transfer fees, then Dogecoin can work for you!

Furthermore, Dogecoin can be used to purchase goods and services, and for tipping people on popular social-media platforms like Reddit and Twitter. See Community and Ecosystem for more information on how Dogecoin can be used and how it works!

Go in depth!

If you want to know more about how Dogecoin works, check the following in-depth articles.

• What is a Blockchain
• What is a Node
• What is a Miner
• What is a Mining Pool

The development of Dogecoin is open, permissionless, and participatory. Over the years, a varied group of developers has contributed to the development of Dogecoin Core, Dogecoin’s reference implementation.

Dogecoin was created by Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer in 2013. Billy worked on Dogecoin Core as its main developer for its first releases. Dogecoin Core started as a fork of Lucky Coin and Litecoin, themselves forks of Bitcoin Core. Dogecoin Core thus derived most of its codebase from the work Bitcoin developers had done on the Bitcoin repository.

In 2014, Billy and Jackson left the project. A group of developers replaced them to act as maintainers of the repository. This group, whose composition changed over the years, coordinated the efforts of more than 40 contributors. New contributors can join the development of Dogecoin Core in the public Github repository, available here.

Development of the overall ecosystem is also crucial - as if the aim of the reference implementation is to build a solid and stable foundation, innovation can happen through services built on top of it (and at times, in synergy with it). There are many solo developers, organizations, and companies building services on top of the existing Dogecoin Core codebase, including payment channel functionality, experimental support for NFTs, and tipping services. The Dogecoin Foundation repository can be found on Github here.

You do not need any authorization or permission to start contributing to Dogecoin Core or to build new services on top of it. If you are interested in becoming a Dogecoin developer, learn more here.

At the time of writing, there is a rapidly expanding list of merchants who accept Dogecoin as a form of payment. Because of this, finding — and maintaining — an up-to-date directory of businesses that #AcceptDoge is no small feat!

Thanks to the overwhelming support from the Dogecoin community in encouraging — and then promoting — businesses that accept Dogecoin, we anticipate that the list of businesses that accept Dogecoin is only going to grow much larger and cover a variety of industries and sectors in the years to come. This is certainly the aim: the Dogecoin community is committed to seeing Dogecoin used as a viable alternative to traditional centralised fiat money.

In addition to large retailers who have signalled they will be accepting Dogecoin in the future, and some who do already, there are thousands of small businesses that accept Dogecoin throughout the world — and this grassroots adoption is crucial to Dogecoin’s success! If you have a business and are interested in accepting Dogecoin, learn more about how to do so [here] (/dogepedia/articles/how-can-my-business-accept-dogecoin).

Web directories listing shops currently accepting Dogecoin can be found in the Resources page.

A wallet is a set of private keys that gives you access to the control of certain coins on the blockchain ledger. When you spend a coin, control of that coin is transferred from being controlled by your keys to being controlled by someone else’s keys.

A wallet app (often referred to simply as a “wallet”) is an application which manages these keys, reports these amounts, and facilitates the transfer of amounts of coins between addresses. Some wallet apps store your keys locally; others store the keys on a remote server (which is less safe). Just remember: whoever has the keys controls the coins.

While some “custodial” services, where coins that are “yours” are held under the service provider’s keys may be trustworthy, keep in mind that many are not. Unless you hold the keys, ultimately, the only thing keeping whoever does hold the keys from transferring your coins is trust.

It is important to understand that unlike a physical wallet, which holds actual notes and coins, crypto wallets do not really “store” your crypto (in this case, Dogecoin) locally. They are storing a collection of private keys and private addresses used to access your Dogecoin, which is actually “living” on the blockchain. The blockchain is a digital ledger of transactions that is duplicated and distributed throughout an entire network of computers called nodes. You could have several wallet applications using the same private keys, and you would be able to access and spend your Dogecoin from each of these apps.

For more information about getting a wallet and the different types of wallets, check the article: How do I get a wallet?.

A blockchain is a digital distributed ledger that is used as a system for validating and recording transaction information. This digital ledger of transactions is duplicated and distributed throughout an entire network of computers connected to the blockchain.

The Dogecoin blockchain consists of thousands of computers – called nodes – meaning that transaction information is not stored in one centralised place. Instead, Dogecoin blockchain information is stored across thousands of nodes. This is why cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin are often referred to as being decentralised.

When a Dogecoin transaction is made, full nodes in the network, by referencing the blockchain, ensure that the sender of the transaction did not create Dogecoin out of thin air and that he is not spending the same Dogecoin twice (double-spending).

In the next step, specialized nodes called miners will include the information regarding the transaction in a block, a data structure where some or all the most recent transactions not yet confirmed by the network are batched together. Finally, the new block is distributed to the other nodes throughout the network, that will confirm that the block is valid. Every block that is created contains the hash of the preceding block, which in turn contains the hash of its preceding block, so on and so forth creating a chain all the way back to Dogecoin’s genesis block.

This way of structuring data, together with the decentralized nature of the network, creates an irreversible timeline where blocks become immutable links in a chain.

In addition to being peer-to-peer and decentralised, another benefit of blockchain technology is that is extremely difficult — and often impossible — to hack, alter, or deceive the system.

There are so many ways to get involved and support Dogecoin. From making memes and artworks – to educating people who are new to crypto: there are endless possibilities for you to get involved and to help the Dogecoin movement.

A good place to start is by joining one or more of the highly active communities on platforms such as Reddit, Twitter, and Discord.

If you have a technical background and would like to contribute to Dogecoin technical development, you can get involved via Dogecoin Core and The Dogecoin Foundation GitHub repositories.

If you’re interested in volunteering at The Dogecoin Foundation, stay tuned to the Foundation website for details coming soon!