Cardano’s Charles Hoskinson Teaches Elon How To Fix Dogecoin

Have you heard the one about Cardano being the marketing ploy to promote Charles Hoskinson’s career as a YouTuber? He sure does spend a lot of time in front of the camera. This time, the marketing genius uses Elon’s Dogecoin promises to make himself look like a scholar. And to trash-talk Bitcoin’s technology. Not bad for only eight minutes.

The information this Periscope transmission contains does seem useful for cryptocurrency developers. The talk is titled “How To Fix Doge (For Elon Musk).” Hoskinson plays it straight and recommends eleven technical papers that the Tesla billionaire can use to fulfill his promise. As you probably know, Elon recently announced:

Working with Doge devs to improve system transaction efficiency. Potentially promising.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 13, 2021

Well, Doge is a Litecoin fork. And Litecoin is a Bitcoin fork, so they basically use the same code. Hoskinson starts by attacking it, saying that Doge operates “on a pretty shi**y Nakamoto consensus style” Scrypt engine. Was that necessary? Of course, because the whole Cardano value proposition rests on the  notion that Bitcoin is old technology. This is a marketing video, so it had to convey that idea. 

Then, he gets into it.

DOGE price chart on Bingbon | Source: DOGE/USDT on TradingView.com

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Eleven Papers To Improve Doge

• To begin with, he recommends Prism. He says it’s “probably the best and fastest Proof-Of-Work protocol on market right now.” It can do 10.000 transactions per second.
• The thing about a Litecoin fork is that it’s supposed to be ASIC resistant. So, Doge needs an algorithm that ASIC miners can’t crack. To solve this problem, Hoskinson recommends the paper, “HashCore: Proof-Of-Work Functions for General Purpose Processors.” About it, he comments, “What I like about it is that it’s made by electrical engineers.”
• Another option for the ASIC resistant problem, the paper “Ballon Hashing: Protection Against Sequential Attacks.”
• For, “a much better way of doing difficulty retargeting,” he recommends “Revisiting Dificulty Control For Blockchain Systems.”
• To change the block structure, he goes with, “Coded Merkle Tree: Solving Data Availability Attacks in Blockchains.” 
• Then, he recommends “Non-Interactive Proofs of Proof-Of-Work.” Referring to this one and the previous paper, he explains, “These two things together in a Proof-Of-Work system give you a beautiful path for extremely efficient light clients” As well as, “four sidechains.”
• Then he goes with the “very sexy” new paper “Mining in Logarithmic Space.” This one is psychedelic, it’s “Bassically saying you don’t need the blockchain to mine the blockchain, how about that?”
• Then, to add smart contracts, he recommends the scripting language Ergo. The paper is called “ErgoScript: A Cryptocurrency Scripting Language Supporting Noninteractive Zero-Knowledge Proofs.”
• The next paper is called “SOK: Cryptocurrency Networking Context. State Of The Art, Challenges.” This one focuses on innovation. Hoskinson explains, “This really takes you through the latest and greatest of all the different network’s stacks on market, trade-offs, and various things to know.”
• Then, to make Doge quantum-resistant, he goes with Nist’s paper “Recommendations for Stateful Hash-Based Signature Schemes.”
• Last but not least, for a hash algorithm he strongly recommends Blake3.

Hoskinson’s final words to Elon

This man is a master communicator. Even though the video is tongue-in-cheek, Hoskinson never breaks character and ends the video seemingly with the utmost respect:

“I hope this is helpful for the Doge community, and for Elon. And I wish him the best of luck in rebuilding that cryptocurrency with his super-elite engineers which I have no doubt he has, as he’s one of the world’s richest men.” 

BTC price chart on Bitbay | Source: BTC/USDT on TradingView.com

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But then, while still playing it straight, he goes for Elon’s jugular:

“Thank you truly for entering our space. And thank you truly for telling everybody that you’re going to take custody of that cryptocurrency and make sure that it gets where it needs to go. And I look forward to see the great innovations that you guys come out with in a year or two.”

Our hat’s off to you, Mr. Charles Hoskinson.

Not bad for an eight-minute video. Not bad at all.

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