Litecoin’s hashing power over the past three months. Source: LiteshackThe reality is that scrypt miners point their mining rigs to the coin that they think has the highest potential for profit.Mining is an important distributed method for confirming transactions, but it ultimately costs money to do so in equipment, electricity and time.As miners have become interested in dogecoin instead of litecoin, this has meant that there is less hashing power growth in LTC. However, at 174,000 total MH/s for LTC versus 71,000MH/s for doge, litecoin is still a much more powerful network.Merged miningIn the past, dogecoin had been retargeting only every four hours. This meant opportunistic miners could move to other scrypt-based coins and cause difficulty to be misrepresented as a test of that network’s hashing power.In order to prevent this, the difficulty retargeting now happens during doge’s block generation, which is roughly every minute. This has helped to better secure dogecoin’s hashing power and made it less volatile. 
Dogecoin’s hashing power over the past three months. Source: LiteshackThe idea of merged mining two independently successful coins is a colorful concept.“Merge mining only affects mining and nothing else,” Lee says in his post. In addition, he tries to allay the fears that litecoin and dogecoin could become tangled with one another rather confusingly.It is a problem that could affect the technical and mainstream communities around both.However, Lee continued:“[It] doesn’t merge the blockchains, the clients, economics of the coins, the dev team, or the communities. All it does is make it so that you mine both coins at the same time, and secure both coins at the same time.”Hard forkLee’s idea is to hard fork dogecoin in order to allow for merged mining. At least one of the coins would need to do so for the idea to work.And the ideal coin to fork is dogecoin, according to Lee:“This [merged mining] can be accomplished by a hard fork in either coin. You’ve likely seen my take on why hard forking litecoin is too dangerous today. Not so for dogecoin.”Dogecoin was hard forked in March, as users were required to update to the 1.6 version of the client that added features like a four-hour maturing period for mined coins.Jackson Palmer, one of the co-founders of dogecoin, believes that litecoin’s size could make a fork quite difficult:“As for the fork, they have a larger market cap and hash rate and are hence more scared about getting 51% of their users to update to a new version.” 
LTC/USD chart over the past three months. Source: LTC-ChartsSpeculative assetsCryptocurrencies exist in a unique predicament, as most aren’t used for anything other than speculation. However, unlike litecoin, dogecoin is actually used for something other than mining or trading for profit.It is a transactional currency for tipping on reddit, something Palmer ideally wants to continue focusing on:“Essentially, I don’t think merged mining is the answer for dogecoin right now. It’s less than five months old and to say that anything needs to be done right now comes down to pure speculation.”Would merged mining help to maintain both litecoin and dogecoin? Probably, but the two currencies are in such different stages that it might be better to let each thrive in its own way.“Brashly changing [proof-of-work] algorithms, merged mining and all other solutions I’ve been presented with are simply band-aids to the fact that a currency requires active use and demand to succeed,” Palmer added.Dogecoin litecoin image via ShutterstockCharlie LeedogecoinJackson Palmerlitecoinmerged miningOriginal author: Daniel Cawrey