The total value of the dog coins in circulation is almost $ 50 billion – not bad for a digital currency that started as a joke.
Like all cryptocurrencies, dogecoin is a digital currency that can be bought and sold like an investment and spent like money.
Although each crypto is unique, it shares some similarities with its better counterparts – the code is based on the script for litecoin, for example. But it has some important differences.
Unlike bitcoin, which set 21 million as the finite amount of the digital currency, dogecoin has 129 billion coins in circulation and will continue to make new blocks of coins available each year. This is part of the reason why one dogecoin is currently about three cents and a bitcoin is worth about $ 62,000.
Although cryptocurrencies are gaining more acceptance as a currency for buying goods, dogecoin does not have much general use of the real world. It has several niche markets, including the use of dogecoin to indicate artists.
And the most important distinction – the active online community – is what makes the foreign ball currency so enjoyable. The group, which operates on Reddit, raised money (in dogecoin, of course) for charity, and in 2014, it successfully funded a sponsorship to get Nascar driver Josh Wise to advertise dogecoin on his car.
How did it start?
Dogecoin was created on December 6, 2013 by some software engineers as a joke.
Billy Markus, an IBM programmer from Portland, Oregon, would distinguish his crypto from bitcoin, which was plagued by a mystery by an anonymous creator and at the time attracted a small niche group of miners. According to Chohan, Mark wanted his crypto-currency to be open to the masses.
The site nods to the origins of the jokes at the very top: His Shiba Inu mascot is the first image on the page that mimics the meme that inspired it, with the same dog, surrounded by a bunch of Comic Sans text in broken English.
On dogecoin.com, his mascot is endorsed: “Dogecoin is an open source peer-to-peer digital currency, favored by Shiba Inus worldwide.”
Why is it so suddenly popular?
Dogecoin is no longer a joke. Its popularity has risen astronomically this year, in part through the use of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
But Elon Musk is the hardest and most prominent proponent of dogecoin. One of his bizarre tweets to his 50 million fans could yield the crypto. This is what happened on Friday, when Musk tweeted ‘Doge Barking at the moon’ and shared a photo of a painting by Spanish artist Joan Miró, entitled ‘Dog Barking at the Moon’.
Dogecoin also enjoyed something of a cult status on the internet message board Reddit, where a popular group – not unlike the WallStreetBets group behind GameStop’s rally – decided earlier this year to allow its value “to the moon”. Dogecoin rose more than 600% after the pressure.
Whether this is a smart investment remains an active question. The more actively traded and more widely accepted bitcoin is subject to extreme volatility, so dogecoin can also crumble without warning. But the rise this year has been incredible.