Thank you for your patience everyshibe,
I'm pleased to announce we have an official 1.14 alpha release: https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/releases/tag/v1.14-alpha-1

It has known limitations that need to be addressed before a release version, in particular around the fee calculations, however it is ready for testing by a wider audience than the Dogecoin developers.

Important notes:

This is not a binary release, you must be comfortable compiling it yourself.
At the moment we expect to re-introduce the alert system into 1.14 before release, please disregard the release notes that discuss its deprecation/removal.
You should not use this with Dogecoin on the main network; it is intended for transactions on the testnet, and block verification/relaying on production. Please wait for a beta before using with real money.
Please do not mine on the production network with this release, as it would trigger a soft fork earlier than expected.
The key tasks before the final 1.14 release include:

Complete an audit of the RPC tests to identify why the remaining tests fail, and correct the test or code as applicable.
Update Gitian builds to support OS X
Re-introduce and test the alert system
Stress test the release on the test network
Forward compatibility tests with 1.15
Hopefully there will be no major bugs in this alpha and the next stage will be a beta/release candidate, once the issues above are addressed. Meanwhile, I hope this will encourage everyone that work is progressing, and we're close to a release.

Ross

I'm not at all on top of my incoming messages, so in an attempt to stem the flood and address most of them, here's the current contents of my head.

I feel some are using our rise to illustrate the absurdity of cryptocurrency pricing (http://uk.businessinsider.com/dogecoin-cryptocurrency-has-market-cap-above-2-billion-2018-1 for example). To me, in an environment where a cryptoasset with $30 USD equivalent transaction fees has a market cap of over a quarter of trillion dollars, I don't think we're the absurd one. Yes we take ourselves less seriously, but that doesn't mean we're not serious behind the scenes. We're a 4 year old currency with transaction fees barely over a cent and significantly higher throughput than most other cryptocurrencies.

That said, now is not the time to pat ourselves on the back, 1.14 needs shipping and we need wider adoption. If you run a service/store, please look into taking Dogecoin. If you don't, please talk to others about how you can help them accept Dogecoin (DO NOT just flood them with emails saying they should, but ask why they don't and what you can do about it).

On that note, lets talk structure of Dogecoin for a second. A lot of people presume Dogecoin is managed by a single coherent entity - this is very much not the case. The founders, current developers, reddit moderators, IRC, social and other teams behave as loosely coupled teams, with our own projects. We talk frequently, but there's no single leadership structure. In common with Bitcoin we have a post-launch dev team; we are not those who decided to launch a coin (that's Jackson & Billy), we saw Dogecoin as it was and decided it was something we wanted to be involved in. We're also not those who missed out on Bitcoin, I was in Bitcoin in 2011, but I didn't believe in how it was designed.

As a consequence of this, "Why is no-one doing <x>?" generally boils down to either "We like it this way" or "Why aren't you doing <x>?".

Most crucially; we're not taking the inflationary coins away because they're why we're in Dogecoin. I said I was in Bitcoin in 2011, and the reason I didn't stick with it is I don't believe in deflationary currencies. Even if we did, we'd have to somehow convince the miners to mine a coin where they weren't paid (which is what the inflation pays for), so the realistic scenario is an inflation-less Dogecoin would either have no miner adoption, or fees matching Bitcoin.

This is typically where someone says something about their investment in Dogecoin. I really can't advise on investments, I bought Bitcoin in 2011 and sold early enough on that I'm typing this from my bedroom rather than a beach, so you probably shouldn't listen to me. I will however say that the developers have a lot less Dogecoin than virtually anyone thinks, and certainly the next dev fund payout is likely to be a significant multiple of my personal holdings, simply because we're post-launch so we've had to buy our Doge the way everyone else had to buy or mine.

What else...

Nodes - I've added a new permanent node in LA, and I'm bringing additional nodes up in Ireland and Seoul now. A bootstrap.dat torrent is being worked on right now, which should help too. If you're running a node please note:

It really needs to be kept online, to ensure it's actually relaying more data than it's consuming
If you can open port 22556 to the world, please do so, it will vastly improve the number of nodes that can connect to you
It's full nodes (those running Dogecoin Core) we need, leaving Multidoge/Android wallet/etc. open doesn't help us very much
1.14 will also significantly improve performance, and is making nice progress. Fees are my next task after this post, and then there's a lot of small items to address, but I'm hoping to get an alpha out shortly. Also I haven't broken testnet yet, which is a nice change compared to 1.10!

We aren't about to introduce paying nodes because it's essentially technically impractical. This could either come from mining rewards (and you can fight either the miners or those who we create too many coins already, for that), or from other receiving nodes themselves. If it's from mining then somehow we'd have to identify contributing nodes, if it's from receiving nodes I'm not sure people are going to be happy with their balance dropping due to network usage. Although it might be a break-even I suppose. Generally, though, paying nodes is called proof of stake, and that's a whole different discussion.

Someone asked about the website - it's being discussed, let me get back to you.

Please treat your Dogecoins and wallet files like you would cash. We can't get them back for you if you send them to the wrong person (if we could, we'd have raided the Dogeparty address and be retired on a beach by now). Keep backups, and never delete old wallets (you never know when you might need a random key from an old wallet).

Full list of changes in 1.14 is coming (although generally if it's in Bitcoin Core 0.14, expect to see it in), but the highlight for me beyond the improved performance is hierarchical deterministic wallets, which mean restoring old wallet backups will recover more recent funds. That should save a lot of lost funds, I hope!

Last one, quick list of Twitter accounts to follow:

Dogecoin: https://twitter.com/dogecoin
Dogecoin developers: https://twitter.com/dogecoin_devs
Jackson Palmer (founder): https://twitter.com/ummjackson
Max Keller (lead developer): https://twitter.com/langer_hans
Me (developer, the chatty one): https://twitter.com/JRossNicoll
Sporklin (community herder): https://twitter.com/MSingularity
42points (reddit moderator): https://twitter.com/42points
Elf Lyons (random comedian I'm throwing in because she's funny): https://twitter.com/elf_lyons
I will be reading messages, but your chances of replies are very slim, sorry everyone. Many thanks for all the tips, they are appreciated!

Much wow,

Ross

We don't talk about the price for a number of reasons, not least of which is if you'd seen my investment history you definitely wouldn't take advice from me, but... hey, yeah, I know a lot of you have just had a really bad day, and it sucks. Take some time to remember what's important in life, hug your family, get some rest, come back to it tomorrow.

Jackson has tweeted he's not intending to be involved with Dogecoin in the future: https://twitter.com/ummjackson/status/952391368067858432 , so lets talk about that for a bit. There's no status change in Max, Patrick or myself as a result of this. It does flag up a need to be better with single person failure risks, though; Jackson has the only control to the dogecoin.com domain, I have the sole access to the @dogecoin_devs Twitter account, etc. We're discussing plans to mitigate these risks currently.

Technical stuff we're working on:

Max spent most of this weekend working on updating tests from Bitcoin Core 0.14 to apply to Dogecoin Core 1.14. He's got all but four to pass, and we currently suspect those four reflect actual issues in Dogecoin Core 1.14. These are all around mempool handling and fees, and it appears this is an interaction between the Dogecoin fee schedule and Bitcoin Core changes for replace by fee (RBF) and spam mitigation. Fixing those is the next priority.
Of changes required to complete Dogecoin Core 1.14, 36 are done, 28 are pending review, 26 are waiting attention. Most of those 26 are a lot simpler (documentation, etc.) than those we've completed.
Patrick is working on Travis builds, which automate the testing process on Dogecoin Core 1.14
Basically - there's a lot of testing happening while we kick the hell out of it to make sure when it ships, it's robust.

Longer term, we're expecting to see a demo of the Doge-Ethereum bridge early next month. This is developed by an external team (and has its own specific bounty in Ethereum). If it works as expected, we'll then draw up a timeline for merging into Dogecoin; I anticipate we'll need a soft fork for this, and we'll handle comms around that when we know more. Examples of where this is useful is letting us do things like replacing the existing dev fund (which works on a simple 2-of-3 basis) with something much cleverer that can do pay-out based on complex voting requirements.

Patrick reports he's seen issues with Bitcoin Core 0.15 (around handling of the UTXO set). I want to have an internal release of 1.15 for testing 1.14 with before 1.14 goes out, but we may skip doing a full release and go direct to 1.16. Bitcoin Core 0.16 is meant to be out in May, so Dogecoin Core 1.16 would ship after that.

Things we need:

More service providers and stores accepting Doge - if you can do this, please do
Easier tools for service providers and stores. Shopify plugins, get Coinbase/Stripe/whoever to accept Doge. We may play silly, but we're a carefully engineered coin that's designed specifically to be a rapid drop-in replacement for Bitcoin, and anywhere with Bitcoin support should be able to support Dogecoin fairly quickly.
More fun - lets get some more memes going guys!
I'll get another update out over the weekend, but it may well be "We're still working out what's wrong with the fee schedule". Meanwhile, stay fluffy!

Ross

Edit: Oh, and you can see 1.14 progress as things are reviewed, at https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/pulls