It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
After the announcement of the Dogecoin and Litecoin merged mining a few days ago we’ve seen some interesting development. The DOGE network hashrate and thus the difficulty has literally skyrocketed as most of the hashrate from the LTC network has been added to the DOGE as people moved to pools with merged mining support. Most of the people mining DOGE directly have also moved to merged mining as with the serious increase of Dogecoin difficulty it became pointless to directly mine for it instead of mining in a pool with support for AuxPow. In fact the AuxPow support for DOGE means that you can merge mine it not only with Litecoin, but with other Scrypt crypto currencies as well, but the main focus of course is merged mining with LTC as there the network hashrate is the highest.
With the spike of difficulty it was expected that the price of the DOGE should rise and some people used that to speculate and do a pump up to about 90 Satoshi and then dumped bringing down the price to about 50 Satoshi. Now however the price has kind of stabilized already at a level of about 70 Satoshi, so we can say that there is a significant increase of the price meaning there is still serious interest in DOGE and the merged mining has actually done more to revive it than to kill it as some pessimists claimed. Still we are about to see what will happen on the long term, but now things seem to be stabilizing after the initial peak of interest. The effect from the merged mining that we are seeing already on the LTC side is that the difficulty has started to increase rapidly, or at least that was observed with the last difficulty adjustment. The Litecoin network difficulty has increased with almost 17% due to the spike of interest and people mining for DOGE and other Scrypt crypto currencies moving to direct LC mining with merged mining support for DOGE. This huge spike in difficulty however should most likely be a single event and we are probably going to see things moving at a slower pace in the next few days.
– For more information about the current status of the Dogecoin network hashrate and difficulty…
We are expecting the merged mining support for Dogecoin and Litecoin that was announced to start after DOGE block 371337 to happen any moment now (less than 100 blocks remaining), so if you are currently mining Dogecoin you might want to move to a pool with merged mining support. You should be able to mine directly for Litecoin and also get Dogecoin additionally, however in order to be able to do that you will have to use a pool that has already implemented DOGE and LTC merged mining support. Do note that merged mining of DOGE can happen with other Scrypt coins as well and not only with LTC, so some pools may have enabled merged mining of Dogecoin with other Scrypt crypto coins. We have prepared a list of pools that have already announced that are ready with merged mining support and as soon as we move past the block that should act as a starting point of the support you should start getting paid in LTC and DOGE by just mining for Litecoin. You will still be able to separately mine only DOGE, however there is not going to be much point in that when you can get the same amount of DOGE extra while mining for LTC in a pool supporting merged mining. There are still not a lot of pools supporting AuxPow merged mining, but we’ll probably see some more adding support in the next few days…
Pools with LTC and DOGE merged mining:
– Coinotron
– Multipool.us
– Litecoinpool.org
– WeMineLTC
Do note that that the AuxPow or merged mining support comes with a hardfork for the DOGE, so you will need to update your wallet to continue using it after block 371337, so if you still haven’t updated to version 1.8 of the Dogecoin wallet than it is time to do the upgrade. Have in mind that the update will require you to reindex the blockchain and that can take some time to complete.