The largest 12-currency, with a market capitalization of $ 6.1 billion, is a joke.
Dogecoin (DOGE) started as a joke in 2013 and is still a joke – but its value has risen by 380% in the past month, up from 696% so far this year.
The currency has been driving the same reddit-driven retail investors by stocks over the past two weeks as stocks like GameStop and AMC, which have been further accelerated by a handful of naughty Elon Musk tweets pumping dogecoin.
On January 28, Dogecoin became the most tweeted cryptocurrency in one day, breaking a January 2 bitcoin one-day record. Dogecoin rose so dramatically last week that Robinhood eliminated its Instant Buying feature, which allows customers to gain instant access to bank transfers, for bitcoin and dogecoin.
“Dogecoin is the crypto of the people,” Musk tweeted very late Wednesday night. He added, “No highs, no lows, just Doge,” and shared a Lion King meme of himself as the monkey Rafiki holding baby Simba up with a Doge head.
The Tesla CEO has been tweeting about dogecoin a number of times since April 2019, when he tweeted: ‘Dogecoin is perhaps my favorite cryptocurrency. This is pretty cool. And as Musk has proven several times, his tweets can move markets – which has landed him in a legal problem in the past.
Musk warned during a live chat on the audio app Clubhouse on Sunday night: “Sometimes I make jokes about dogecoin, but it’s really meant to be jokes.” That did not stop him from sending out more tweets pumping the coin this week.
The ‘doge’ meme dates from 2010, started by a Shiba Inu owner in Japan. The meme evolved to show any Shiba Inu along with phrases in Comic Sans text in stylized English.
Dogecoin was created in 2013 by programmers Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus as a fork of luckycoin (which is no longer available), which was itself a fork litecoin (LTC). (Cryptocurrency forks are adaptations to the underlying source code of a blockchain protocol to bring about a diverse protocol or coin.) In 2014, dogecoin adapted the merger support with litecoin.
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Palmer walked away from dogecoin in 2015. He has repeatedly said that he meant dogecoin merely as a joke, made no money from its creation and that he sees a real danger in its rise: ‘I think that says a lot about the state of the cryptocurrency space in the generally that a currency with a dog on it that has not released a software update for more than two years has a market value of $ 1 billion +, ‘he said in 2018.
Three years later, the market value of the coin is six times greater – with no practical function behind it and no limit on how much dog coins can be mined (there is 100 billion in stock and growth). Bitcoin is limited to 21 million.
And yet, you can buy and trade dogecoin relatively easily on dozens of crypto exchange sites, including Binance, Kraken, Huobi and Robinhood, and real people really make money from it. (Coinbase does not support buying dogecoin, but you can store dogecoin in the Coinbase Wallet app.)
Do not get everything according to Musk.
Viral meme stocks have been trading with cryptocurrencies for a while amid the rise the home retail investor has caused by pandemic.
Wall Street hedge fund titans who previously fired bitcoin now give a percentage of their portfolios to it. PayPal, Square, Visa and other payment names for household payments have opened their arms to crypto. Automated video game maker Atari has launched a crypto token. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has launched a crypto token. The market value of all cryptocurrencies hit $ 1 trillion for the first time in January, and even a joke like dogecoin is a very significant part of it.
[READ MORE: How bitcoin narratives have evolved to fuel current price surge]
So should you buy dogecoin as an investment?
Advice shared at a Yahoo Finance crypto summit in 2018 by Nick Tomaino, a Coinbase alum who now runs the crypto-VC firm 1 confirmation, still holds true: “How I describe most of these coins is that it currencies are based on meme, “he said. ‘In the last year there has been so much interest and zeal in this space that if you create a coin and have a good share, you can have a billion dollars in market value … Why is it a bad thing in the short term thing? ? Because a lot of people are probably going to lose a lot of money. Why is this a good thing in the long run? Because for every person who just wants to get rich quick, there is also a person who is more deeply interested in technology. And that will help the space in the long run. ”
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Daniel Roberts is editor-in-chief at Yahoo Finance and has been dealing with bitcoin since 2011. Follow him on Twitter at @readDanwrite.
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