Can an internet meme be worth more than a legendary company like Ford Motor Company? It turns out that it does, if it takes the form of such a phenomenon as the Dogecoin cryptocurrency, whose capitalization reaches $50 billion. In April, it began to break popularity records among Internet users, and one of its enthusiasts is none other than the second richest man in the world – Elon Musk.
Dogecoin – what is it?
Dogecoin (DOGE) is a cryptocurrency based on blockchain technology, allowing you to make fast payments with minimal transaction fees. The name and logotype of Dogecoin refer to the popular graphic meme Doge (known in Poland as “dogeł”) depicting a Shiba Inu dog, most often with funny captions written in broken English. So, the answer to the question “what does Dogecoin mean” is very simple – in our language, it’s simply “Coin Doge”.
Dogecoin – History
The concept of Dogecoin was created by American IBM programmer Billy Markus on the basis of the now defunct Luckycoin cryptocurrency, based on the source code of Litecoin (LTC), which in turn is a modified version of the Bitcoin code. Soon after, Jackson Palmer, who works at the Australian branch of Adobe Systems, was encouraged on Twitter to take part in the project. He bought the domain dogecoin.com, designed the logotype and got involved in the promotion of Dogecoin, which was initially supposed to be just an online joke.
Where did the idea for a cryptocurrency with the image of a “doge” come from? To explain this, we need to go back to December 2013, when the Internet was buzzing about the SilkRoad scandal – the criminal equivalent of eBay or Allegro operating on the Dark Web, where you could buy weapons, fake documents or drugs. In connection with the arrests made by FBI agents in this case, the media for the first time really took an interest in Bitcoin – SilkRoad’s settlement currency. BTC began to be seen as an instrument of criminals, which clearly spoiled the reputation of this cryptocurrency. Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus decided to remedy this – so they created a cryptocurrency that evokes unequivocally positive associations.
The DOGE network was launched on December 6, 2013, and a few days later, on December 16, its price more than tripled in a day, to $0.00095, and almost everyone in the digital currency community heard about the cryptocurrency. Dogecoin’s strength has been its community from the beginning, not the mere technical features of the cryptocurrency that would justify its popularity. DOGE has quickly become a recognizable means of payment accepted by users of social networks such as Reddit and Twitter.
Year after year, as the importance of cryptocurrencies in the global capital market grew, Dogecoin also gained popularity. The most incredible events related to this digital currency, however, took place in April this year. Well, on April Fool’s Day, Elon Musk, who turned out to be a fan of this cryptocurrency, declared on Twitter that his company operating in the space industry – SpaceX, would literally put the actual Dogecoin on the moon. However, this is not the end of the madness – on April 15, the philanthropist published a message on Twitter with the painting “Dog Barking at the Moon” by Spanish artist Joan Miró, which he captioned with a slightly changed title “Doge Barking at the Moon” referring to Dogecoin. Effect? On that day, Dogecoin’s price soared from 12 to 18 cents, and just a day later it reached its current all-time high value of 43.77 cents. It is worth noting that on January 1 this year, Dogecoin was worth just 0.47 cents. This means that its value has managed to increase almost a hundred times in recent months.
Currently, Dogecoin is worth around 31 cents, but it seems that it has not said its last word yet. The goal of the online community of cryptocurrency enthusiasts is to push the Dogecoin exchange rate to $1.
Dogecoin – characteristics
We already know what Dogecoin is, where this cryptocurrency came from and what its exchange rate has been in recent months. What else do we need to know about this nice coin?
Well, Dogecoin is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency based on the source code of Luckycoin, which was a modified version of Litecoin. Luckycoin featured a completely random reward for mined blocks for miners, which also functioned in DOGE until March 2014. Later, however, the block reward was set at 10,000 DOGE. According to the initial assumptions,
Dogecoin was supposed to have a limited number of coins to 100 billion, but this was abandoned back in December 2013 in favor of an unlimited maximum supply. It is therefore, unlike Bitcoin, but similar to Ethereum, an inflationary cryptocurrency. Inflation is around 5% per year. There are currently 128.2 billion DOGE circulating in the market, with each coin divided into 100,000,000 decimal places.
Dogecoin is a Proof of Work cryptocurrency based on the Scrypt algorithm (similar to Litecoin), mined mainly using ASICs. The block time in DOGE is much lower than in BTC (about 10 minutes) and LTC (about 2.5 minutes) and is about 60 seconds, which ensures faster transaction confirmations. The average transaction commission is usually less than 1 cent (the starting amount is 1 DOGE per 1000 bytes of data). The great importance of Dogecoin is also evidenced by the fact that it is listed on almost all major cryptocurrency exchange platforms, such as Bitfinex, Binance, Kraken and Bittrex.
A huge advantage of Dogecoin is its extremely intuitive software. Even inexperienced users with no experience with virtual coins can install the Dogecoin Core software and use the computing power of the CPU or GPU to start mining the currency in just a few minutes.
Dogecoin – interesting facts
It is worth noting that Dogecoin has also been used many times to raise funds for charity. Some of the ideas were extremely creative. The first fundraiser of this type, which became really loud, was the funding of the Jamaican bobsleigh team the opportunity to compete in the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia in 2014.
The national team managed to qualify, but did not have enough funds to go to Russia. The DOGE collection began on January 19, 2014, reaching the equivalent of over $35,000 within a day, which allowed the Jamaican national team to be sent to the Olympics. Why did online Dogecoin enthusiasts want to allow this team to participate in the Olympics? This is a reference to the cult comedy “Reggae on Ice” from 1993.
Just two months later – in March 2014 – the Dogecoin community organized another extremely interesting fundraiser. This time, lovers of this cryptocurrency raised over 55 thousand dollars so that the “doge” became a sponsor of one of the competitors of American NASCAR races, Josh Wise. Why did this driver receive such generous support from Internet users? Because it sensationally qualified for the most famous American racing series and received the starting number “98”, but it did not have a sponsor. As a thank you, Wise painted his car in Dogecoin colors, thanks to which, as you can guess, it aroused enormous interest on the track.