Hey guys, a new version of the Dogecoin client is out, is it important that you update as soon as you can. You can find more information on updating here.

Here is a quick rundown on what is changing:

Now, onto the juicy part; what did we change?

Firstly, for those of you not already aware -- Dogecoin has been gamed by Multipools. Multipools were cherry-picking large blocks (which were found to be provably pre-calculable), and hammering our networks hashrate -- making mining for the solo doges incredibly difficult, while dampening their payouts massively. The end result was Multipool’s having twice as much doge as the average consumer; allowing them to dump our prices down with ease.

This ends with v1.6.

Changes implemented;

1) No longer a random block reward -- we now only have static blocks. The current reward will be 250,000 Doge per block, with the halvening dropping us to 125,000 Doge per block, etc etc. This will prevent block cherry-picking; as we’re seeing at the moment, with our community pools only seeing 100-200k blocks, while the multi’s gaming the system are enjoying 300-500k blocks. From the 1.6 update, all blocks will be completely even.

2) The DigiShield difficulty algorithm: again, developed and contributed by the very clever folks at /r/DigiByte[8] , this allows for rapid block retarget times, and rapid recovery from multipools suddenly hitting the network; meaning that our miners will no longer suffer from extremely long block times if a Multipool does decide to jump on board. This new algorithm will retarget our block times MUCH faster -- ensuring the hard-mining shibe is not left holding the bag after the multipool ransack.

These improvements are very helpful to those of us that just mine dogecoin, as it makes people unable to change to mining dogecoin if there are blocks with more coins.

You can find more information about the specific changes here.