Hey shibes, me again!

So, yesterday we announced our AuxPoW switchover at block 371337.

Today we're here to give you Dogecoin Core 1.8 beta 1.

This is a testing release. It already has all what's needed to get the switchover going. Still, we wanted to have a beta out for you to check it out and see if everything else is still running fine.

You do NOT need to update to this version yet. You can, if you want to try playing on the testnet for example.

Something important to know:
After you updated your client and start 1.8 the first time, the Qt client will prompt you for a reindex of the block data. It is important to accept this, as the format has changed. This takes, depending on your machine, somehwere around 15-30 minutes. It will not re-download the chain, just reindex your local copy. If you are running a daemon (dogecoind), then you need to manually start it with the -reindex parameter once!.

Download
The downloads and the complete release notes with some more details can be found right here:

https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/releases/tag/v1.8.0-beta-1

Thank you
I'd also like to use this opportunity to thank everyone who contributed to the dev fund lately (and also before of course). We really appreciate all the donations! I hope you accept this universal thanks here as we can't really follow all the tips lately ;) So thanks!
Of course thanks to everyone who contributed to this release, may it be by code, by advice, or any other form of work towards it!

Dev fund
Speaking of which. Since we alwas get asked, it can be found right here. The money contributed there by you (and also the dev ASIC funded by you) will be used to pay for the costs we had while developing and testing. We will, for transparency, let you know about the payouts when they happen :)

ETA and other wallets?
We are currently looking into a final release coming weekend-ish if the final testing goes well. This will also be the time for the Android and MultiDoge updates to follow. Everything will be ready in time :)

-The Dogecoin CoreDevs