Hey shibes!

It's done! Today we are here to release Dogecoin Core 1.8 as the final release. I will start with a TL;DR of the release notes. I'd recommend everyone reading them, especially if you are a service provider.

Release notes

• AuxPoW
  Starting with block 371,337 the Dogecoin network will accept AuxPoW blocks from miners of other chains.

• Upgrading
  Please always make a backup of your wallet.dat! The Qt wallet will prompt you to do a reindex at first start after the upgrade. It's mandatory to do this and will take about 30-60 minutes to complete depending on your machine. Note that your transactions will slowly start to confirm again while the reindex moves on. If you run dogecoind, you have to start with -reindex once manually. To ensure a smooth switchover to AuxPoW, 1.8 has safe mode disabled 1 hour before until 24 hours after the switch block. This ensures the actually legit fork will not trigger safe mode and halt mining. If you don't want to have this behavior, then refer to the 1.8-safemode branch. This one doesn't include the patch to disable safe mode.

• Downgrading
  Only possible with a complete fresh resync, but remmeber that at the switchover block you have to be on 1.8!

• AuxPoW and mining
  Depends on your pool if they implement AuxPoW. Powerpool and p2pool support it. A NOMP fork was found and is being worked on. Look for news from your pools for this :)

• Payment Protocol
  Dogecoin Core 1.8 adds payment protocol support, which is used to streamline payments being made to merchants.

• Transaction fees
  To have consistent fees, all transactions have a base fee now which constinues to be 1 DOGE.

• RPC
  If you use rpcallowip, make sure to use CIDR notation instead of wildcards. 192.168.*.* becomes 192.168/16.

• More?
  See linked release notes :)

Is this mandatory?

Yes, this is a mandatory update! The switchover block is projected to happen around September 12th. You have to update before then!

Downloads

Downloads are available from: https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/releases/tag/v1.8.0
and of course from http://dogecoin.com/

How do I update?

1. Backup your wallet! This is very important! Go to File -> Backup Wallet, and save this file in at least two safe places for a good backup.
   
2. Exit the client you're running now.
   

3. Install the update

   1. For Windows, use the setup.exe to update.
      Windows 8 info: If SmartScreen pops up, click More Info then Run Anyway.
   2. For Mac just overwrite the version you currently have in you Applications folder.
      
   3. For Linux you'd overwrite your current dogecoin-qt binary with the new one.
      

4. Start the client, confirm the reindex prompt and wait. That's it :)

Other wallets?

Will follow soon. You'll get an update notification, as both Android wallet and MultiDoge have that built in :)

EDIT: Android Wallet update released: http://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/2en5uv/dogecoin_android_wallet_108_mandatory_update/
MultiDoge update released: http://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/2eujqs/multidoge_013_another_mandatory_update/ Info from the WowDoge dev: http://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/2e3xhx/dev_fund_reached_10_million_thank_you/ck0t5y5?context=3

Questions?

Ask here and we try our best to answer them all :) I also probably forgot some stuff here so will edit it in when I remember :D

Thanks

Again thanks to everyone who contributed to this release and also thanks to everyone who contributed to the dev fund!