Unlike Bitcoin’s known schedule, early Dogecoin issued a different reward per block: a Mersenne Twister draw between zero and a scheduled maximum, inherited from Luckycoin. Dogecoin Core’s 1.6 hard fork ended that era at block 145,000 around 17 March 2014, because large pools were cherry-picking high-reward blocks. Ten years later, anyone who wanted to number shibes from genesis had to reconstruct every irregular subsidy or admit they were counting a fictional coin supply.
The trap
An ordinal scheme is only as true as its birth list. If you mis-state how many atomic units a block created, every later transfer of those units is a story about the wrong objects. Core’s FAQ still prints both schedules: the original lottery (0–1,000,000, then 0–500,000) and the fixed ladder that replaced it. DRC-20 documentation describes scraping historical subsidies — sometimes discussed with a Mersenne Twister reconstruction — and feeding them into an ord fork. That labor is why some teams waited until May 2023 and pretended the chain had been born then.
The 1.6 blog post is blunt: community pools were seeing 100–200k-reward blocks while multipools gaming the lottery enjoyed 300–500k. Static rewards ended that. The same fork switched difficulty retarget from about four hours to every minute (DigiShield) so a hash-rate raid could not leave honest miners holding empty minutes. See Dogecoin for the full table, AuxPoW, and the later decision to keep a 10,000 DOGE tail forever.
Not starting from block 0 is like removing Satoshi’s BTC because some people didn’t participate in 2009.Doge Labs, on first-seen and genesis indexing
Sources
Primary texts for this chapter. The full index lives on Doginals sources.
- Dogecoin Core FAQ (reward schedule) — GitHub
- Mandatory Update: Dogecoin 1.6 — Dogecoin Dev Blog
- apezord/doginals — GitHub