2014 · SHARED WORK
Two chains, one mining effort.
Merged mining connected Litecoin and Dogecoin without merging their money.
On September 11, 2014, LitecoinPool.org announced that Dogecoin could be mined alongside Litecoin. Dogecoin Core 1.8’s release notes specified auxiliary proof of work beginning at Dogecoin block 371,337. These records make the change concrete: miners could use compatible work for distinct blockchains, each retaining its own ledger and monetary rules.
The arrangement should not be drawn as two coins melting together. LTC and DOGE did not become interchangeable units, and a transaction on one chain did not become a transaction on the other. The connection concerns the production and validation of mining proofs. Pool payout policies are an additional service layer, separate from the consensus rules.
This relationship widened the story of Scrypt mining. The economics of a compatible mining operation can involve more than one reward stream, while users still choose a particular network for a payment. It is a good anniversary example of cooperation through engineering: coordination at one layer can coexist with independence at another. Understanding the boundary is the point of the diagram.