forking dogecoin...

Congratulations to dogecoin for adding merged mining!

Unfortunately, since at this time pycoind doesn't support AuxPoW, dogecoin is currently not working beyond block 371,337.

I hope to get AuxPoW implemented soon, as we love dogecoin and it would also open up the beginnings of supporting namecoin.

close, but no cigar

I am finally releasing pycoind, however, it is not *quite* a full node yet.

What?! Why not?

Part of being a full node is verifying each input of each transaction of each block. Unfortunately this is slow. Very slow. It has taken a couple months to work my way through 60% of the blockchain. Once I have verified the blockchain successfully validates against pycoind, I will add checkpoints.

Checkpoints allow blockchain validation to skip old transactions, and the node can catch up to verify and relay new transactions.

In the meantime, pycoind is still a useful library for many tasks, such as analysing the blockchain, working with addresses and experimenting with script.

which old witch?

Just an FYI, the patent US 6141420 has expired, so everyone should feel free to compress their elliptic curve cryptographic public key points to their little hearts' contents.

Although patented, the patent has never been challenged, and would certainly not have stood up in court as ECC point compression was published in a paper a year prior to the filing and was co-authored by one of the patent author (hence, was well aware of the prior art). A more in-depth argument for the invalidity of the patent can be read here.