Growing pains and changes

(May 20, 2021)

DogecoinFah has been rewarding the Dogefolders team weekly for about 6 years now. We may have paid late, but we've never missed a week. Recently we've struggled to keep going due to growing pains. Things are not ideal currently. We are in a poor situation and doing the best we can. I have a plan in the works which will make things much better. It is getting closer to being ready, but will take a little more time. In the meantime, we continue to FODL!

Growing pains: participants

Dogefolders suddenly gained about 3600 new folders in one week and continues to grow. Currently we are looking at 4000 to 5000 active folders! This overwhelmed the Folding@home API we were using and several other aspects of how the system worked. Some quick coding overhauls allowed us to move to a different Folding@home API and revise the system to handle the new load of participants. With this hurdle behind us, new ones became apparent.

Growing pains: value

The large increase in the value of Dogecoin caused some addition growing pains with funding. The donation funds could no longer afford to give 1 Doge for each qualified folder, with the Guard Doge contribution. This was very sad, because I loved that each folder got at least a little bit of reward.

Poor situation

This leaves us in a poor situation. The minimum the Dogecoin network allows you to economically send to any one address is a whole Dogecoin. So, with the value high, it is hard to have a large donation amount. With the large amount of participants, a small donation amount doesn't split between very many folders, with a minimum of one whole Dogecoin.

Doing the best we can

Currently, we are doing the best we can. We are splitting what donations we have, proportionally, between the as many top scoring folders we can, while still giving at least one full Dogecoin. Not only do we have a lot of folders participating, but some of our much appreciated top scoring folders produce some quite high folding points. This makes the competition to have enough folding points to be included in the reward and paid anything pretty difficult. It saddens me to see that only a small percent of folders get any Dogecoin at all in recent weeks. The less donations for the week, the worse the problem is, but I couldn't consciously seek sponsorships and funding in such a precarious situation.

I have a plan

The best solution I've come up with or been suggest is to make DogecoinFah hold rewards until folders have accumulated enough rewards to payout. This would work similar to a Dogecoin faucet, where you had a minimum to withdraw. There are some draw backs to this approach. It causes DogecoinFah to potentially hold much more Dogecoins than before, so security issues become heightened. It also feels bad to tell a bunch of people you are giving them donations, then moving most of those funds into a different wallet for storage. The biggest issue is that updating the DogecoinFah system to support this is a large, time-consuming, task and would take lots of coding and testing.

Getting closer to being ready

The good news is that I'm getting pretty close to having this code ready. It's taken a lot of effort and a whole lot of testing, but I found a way to add this support without it taking months. A working prototype test server is being polished as quickly as possible. There's still lots of details to work out. This might still mean that not everyone would get Dogecoins, but it should be much more folders included.

We continue to FODL!

So please bear with us patiently as we try to improve our system. Remember we are a donation funded project, with no revenue source, or anyone getting rich. We're here to enable generous shibes to encourage helping scientists find cures for diseases, while promoting Dogecoin.

Happy folding,
SoCo