merged mining is the way to go in order to stay relevant and more powerful against network attacks, especially since Litecoin has about 2 or 3 times the hashing power dogecoin does.
1 vote for merge mining here. It was good for namecoin, so shall it be for dogecoin
+1. Glad to see some people have a clue about dogecoin's future... There seem to be a lot of people around that don't understand crypto currencies well enough to see that a non-merge-mined coin cannot survive if it has significantly less hashrate then the leading coin using that proof of work algorithm.
I hope the dev team smartens up and moves to a merge-mined model preferably before the next block halving. Every block halving that passes is going to weaken the doge network significantly, and the price is likely to fall with it.
Doge has attracted new people to crypto, who knew nothing about BTC.
^^^
The above statement matters, whether you agree or not.
I agree with your former statement... but, I strongly disagree that it matters. This follows pretty basic logic. A first experience driving might be in an old ford beater... that certainly does not mean you're going to use that car exclusively - in fact, now that you know how to drive and understand some basics about vehicles, you'll probably move to a nicer car.
Just because someone first learns about distributed currencies because of Doge, hardly means they won't move on to stronger networks like bitcoin or litecoin.
Why should the price fall with a decrease awards twice? I think that now the lowest price just because of the miners, many coins are mined and sold without hesitation at the current price - supply exceeds demand! That will produce half already looking forward to think whether to sell so cheap price can grow.