Billy Markus, co-founder of Dogecoin, described the possibility of removing merge mining from the cryptocurrency’s protocol as “stupid and pointless.” Markus, who identifies himself on X as “Shibetoshi Nakamoto,” expressed his position during an exchange within the DOGE community, where the debate over merge mining has been generating divided opinions.
Merge mining, also known as auxiliary Proof-of-Work or AuxPoW, allows mining two or more cryptocurrencies simultaneously with the same hashrate without splitting computational power. Dogecoin and Litecoin adopted this model in August 2014, a decision that strengthened Dogecoin’s security against the risk of 51% attacks, which were feasible at the time due to the smaller number of miners securing the network.
as a non-dev who has no investment in any scrypt altcoins and just thinks proposals should solve actual necessary problems and not random made up ones for self-serving reasons, i find this reply disingenuous
removing merge mining is pointless, so it shouldn’t be done
— Shibetoshi Nakamoto (@BillyM2k) July 20, 2026
Markus clarified that his opinion comes from a non-technical role, as he stepped away from active development of the project in 2014. He also acknowledged holding no investments in scrypt altcoins, a category that includes Dogecoin and Litecoin, after publicly disclosing that he had sold all his crypto assets in a single transaction: 50 Bitcoin, 440 Litecoin, and 6 million DOGE. Most of the community supports the current model, arguing that combined mining maximizes rewards for miners and keeps the network secure.
Source: https://x.com/BillyM2k/status/2079348540929942007
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