last updated for 1.14.5
The Dogecoin chain has a relatively low block interval, 1 megabyte blockspace and aims to provide a cheap means for people to transact. Therefore, the biggest threat to the Dogecoin chain as a whole is spam and in 2014, a transaction fee and dust disincentive were introduced, to combat on-chain spam.
Dogecoin Core implements a number of defaults into the software that reflect the developers' recommendations towards fees and dust limits, that at the moment of release represent the developers best estimate of how these limits should be parametrized. The recommended defaults, as implemented in the Dogecoin Core wallet, are:
- 0.01 DOGE per kilobyte transaction fee
- 1.00 DOGE dust limit (discard threshold)
- 0.001 DOGE replace-by-fee increments
The wallet rejects transactions that have outputs under the dust limit, and discards change to fee if it falls under this limit.
Note: The recommended dust limit is expected to be lowered in a follow-up release, once enough miners and relay nodes have adopted newly introduced relay dust limits touched upon below.
Note: In the past, Dogecoin has enforced a rounding function in the fee
mechanism. As of version 1.14.5, this is no longer the case, and fees are
calculated over the exact size of a transaction. For example, a 192 byte
transaction only has to pay 0.01 / 1000 * 192 = 0.00192
DOGE fee.
The default values for miners to include a transaction in a block has been set to exactly the recommended fee of 0.01 DOGE/kB. Dust limits are defined by the miner's mempool policy, see below.
The relay and mempool acceptance policies are lower than the recommendations by default, to allow for a margin to change recommendations in the future (or user preference) without the need for an adopted software release in advance. This greatly simplifies future policy recommendations. As historically, most relay nodes do not change these default settings, these often represent an absolute mininum
The default minimum transaction fee for relay is set at 0.001 DOGE/kB, exactly one-tenth of the recommended fee. This gives miners and relay operators a 10x downward margin to operate within from a spam management perspective.
The mempool logic implements 2 dust limits, a hard dust limit under which a transactions is considered non-standard and rejected, and a soft dust limit that requires the limit itself to be added to the transaction fee, making the output economically unviable.
- The hard dust limit is set at 0.001 DOGE - outputs under this value are invalid and rejected.
- The soft dust limit is set at 0.01 DOGE - sending a transaction with outputs under this value, are required to add 0.01 DOGE for each such output, or else will be considered to have too low fee and be rejected.
The increments used for replace-by-fee and limiting the mempool once it has reached its locally defined maximum size, is by default set at one-tenth of the relay fee, or 0.0001 DOGE.