Sometimes, the best things in life start as a joke, and Dogecoin is not an exception. Initially created as a joke in December 2013, based on the popular Doge meme of a Shiba Inu dog, it soon became a popular cryptocurrency thanks to Elon Musk’s tweets and Mark Cuban’s comments dubbing the coin as the strongest crypto! Investments and more touting by other celebrities such as prank influencer and YouTuber Ben Phillips, rapper Soulja Boy who called Dogecoin “the crypto of the future”, Gene Simmons of Kiss and Snoop Dogg, have pushed its value and popularity higher. On 9 August, Dogecoin had the fifth-largest market cap of any crypto at $31 billion.
Who let the doges out? The beginning
Dogecoin has its paws rooted in a specific cultural time and is part of the internet pop culture and community which has also given birth to memes and cryptocurrencies. When Australian entrepreneur Jackson Palmer and software engineer Billy Markus created the currency in 2013, they designed it to be ridiculous and to prevent people from using it in the long term.
In an interview, Palmer said that he came up with the idea when he had two internet tabs open, one of the aforementioned memes and the other of a list with all the recent market cryptocurrency projects. When he coined the phrase Dogecoin he tweeted the now popular “Investing in Dogecoin, pretty sure it’s the next big thing” which ignited huge interest in the crypto community.
But Elon Musk has also played a key role with his tweets, and he was characteristically named as the “Dogefather” due to his support of the crypto. Dogecoin’s price was up 300% following the two weeks of its release, while the next year a tipping service called DogeTipBot pushed its usability by allowing users to send Dogecoin to each other for posting positive content.
In 2015, Dogecoin’s creators stepped away from Dogecoin, which is now run by volunteer developers from the Dogecoin community who occasionally update the underlying code. Earlier this year, members of a Reddit channel called “wallstreetbets” started pumping Dogecoin, pushing doge prices 142% higher and a further 200% after Tesla CEO Elon Musk shared a satirical image of “Dogue” magazine to his Twitter followers.
How Does Dogecoin Work?
Dogecoin, just like Bitcoin, is a cryptocurrency that runs on blockchain technology and miners get rewarded with Dogecoin for solving equations to process transactions and record them on the Dogecoin blockchain. Due to the fact that new Dogecoins are created through mining daily, it is difficult to speculate on the price of Dogecoin or any gains in the long term. In comparison to bitcoin, Dogecoin is easier and less complex, as it uses less computational power, and for this reason, is more efficient as a payment method and less harmful to the environment.
Should you dodge the doge?
The fact that there is no specific limit on the number of Dogecoins that can be created since millions of new ones are released every single day, makes the cryptocurrency less appealing in the long term. As many analysts also have noted, perhaps the time to go all-in on the cryptocurrency has ended a while ago.
However, enthusiasm is still growing. Dogecoin’s reestablishment of a central development team at the Dogecoin Foundation with Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin as a member is an important step to keep the flame burning and the Doge barking.
New upgrades could offer a further boost since Elon Musk backed a major network upgrade which improved its security and reduced transaction fees. Users on social platforms, like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and others, can also continue using Dogecoin to reward, or “tip,” each other for posting content.
