Dogecoin Standard - A Specification.

The Dogecoin Standard will be a Written Specification and validating test suite derived from the Dogecoin Core Wallet during the process of creating libdogecoin. The Dogecoin Standard aims to fully document the reference implementation (Core Wallet), filling the gap of the often requested ‘whitepaper’ and providing docs to anyone trying to understand how Dogecoin works.

As we’ve seen recently with some exchanges, ‘getting Dogecoin wallets right’ isn’t easy and right now to understand how Dogecoin works you need to read the code, or have been part of the Dogecoin project from the early days. What we hope to achieve by documenting Dogecoin is multi-faceted:

Lower the barrier for new Devs.

One thing we’ve experienced trying to get more devs into the Dogecoin community is the steep learning curve faced by even experienced developers. Currently we’re pointing people at the Bitcoin documentation and saying “It’s a bit like this but there are differences”, which is not helpful unless you have a pocket-ross/michi/pat/max to hold your hand. By creating developer focused documentation we hope to see a rise in the number of developers moving into the Dogecoin space, and that’s good for everyone.

Standard-based functional test suite

Standards are fantastic, but unless they are provable they don’t hold much water. Part of the process of creating the Dogecoin Standard will be the creation of a companion test-suite that will effectively exercise any implementation of Dogecoin and be able to validate that it is compliant.

This is a huge accelerator for a diverse Dogecoin ecosystem: when we can make changes to our node and wallet implementations and validate immediately that they will still work with the ecosystem, everyone moves faster.

Community Proposal Process.

For the first time the Dogecoin Protocol will be represented in a way that can be implemented independently of the Core Wallet. This will provide the opportunity for the community to create a robust change-process via DIPs (Dogecoin Improvement Proposals) which can be discussed broadly in the community and with key stakeholders for a specified time prior to adoption.

We believe that a consensus-based community (which we have via a decentralised network) should have a strong preference for experimental implementations that exercise DIPs and demonstrate their effectiveness, similar to the W3C approach for web standards.

The Foundation believes that moving the definitive Dogecoin Protocol reference from the old Core Wallet implementation to a community managed specification will secure the future of Dogecoin from the risks it currently faces existing as a single Wallet only. The more Dogecoin Standard compliant wallet implementations exist, the more secure-by-implementation-consensus the protocol becomes, much as the consensus-based safety of the live network rests on diversity of nodes.