There have been talks about possible merge mining support for Dogecoin along with Litecoin or either the DOGE forking from Scrypt to another GPU-only algorithm, so that it will not be mineable with Scrypt ASICs. It seems however that the final decision by the DOGE devs is to go the merged mining way as they have announced that they will enable the Dogecoin blockchain to accept auxiliary proof-of-work from other Scrypt chains. There is already a new branch available in the DOGE Github repository called 1.8-dev which has the AuxPoW switch on the testnet set, so that pool operators can experiment with merged mining before the actual fork to enable it on the main chain. There is no exact date on the update happening announced yet, but it should be sometime soon if there are no serious problems and if pools start adding merged mining support for LTC and DOGE. Do note that you will not be forced to use a pool with merged mining support, you would still be able to mine separately both Litecoin and Dogecoin if you wish to, however why not mine both together when there should be no drawbacks in that and only positives. This way fan of DOGE could merge mine and use the mined LTC to buy more Dogecoin for example, however the miners interested in LTC can also dump the mined DOGE for more LTC. How this will affect the DOGE is still uncertain, however many believe that this is the way to actually save Dogecoin from slowly dying.

– Read the official announcement from the Dogecoin devs about the upcoming AuxPoW support…

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