Many people are investing in dogecoins as Dogecoin's business directory boasts over 200 companies that accept it as a form of payment. Dogecoin also has an enthusiastic and committed user base, and holders of the currency have engaged in several charity campaigns to help establish its legitimacy.Under the hood, Dogecoin is essentially a proof-of-work currency. Dogecoin's main technological difference is its hashing algorithm – the code it uses to create the difficult math problems that power its proof-of-work scheme. Dogecoin uses an algorithm called Scrypt, which is designed to require more computing power to run than the traditional SHA-256 algorithm. Scrypt was originally introduced in the hopes that it would break the dominance of users running specialized hardware to monopolize mining, but it turns out that Scrypt can be run on specialized hardware as well, so that benefit has been negated.The main advantage of a Scrypt-based cryptocurrency today is that many of these currencies allow "merged mining" with other compatible currencies. This means that users of one Scrypt-based cryptocurrency can compete to verify transactions on multiple different currency networks at once without having to expend more processing power.