The total value of the dogecoins in circulation is nearly $ 50 billion – not bad for a digital currency that started out as a joke.
Like all cryptocurrencies, dogecoin is a digital currency that can be bought and sold as an investment and spent as money.
While each crypto is unique, it shares some similarities with its more famous peers – for example, the code is based on the script for litecoin. But it has a few important differences.
Unlike bitcoin, which has set 21 million as the digital currency’s finite amount, dogecoin has 129 billion coins in circulation and will continue to make new blocks of coins available for mining every year. That’s part of the reason why a dogecoin is currently valued at about three dimes and a bitcoin is worth about $ 62,000.
Although cryptos are increasingly accepted as a currency for buying goods, dogecoin is not widely used in practice. It has a few niche markets, including using dogecoin to tip online artists.
And the main differentiator – the active online community – is what makes the foreign currency so much fun. The group, which operates on Reddit, has raised money (in dogecoin, of course) for charities, 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 a few software engineers as a joke.
Billy Markus, an IBM programmer from Portland, Oregon, wanted to differentiate his crypto from bitcoin, which was steeped in mystery by an anonymous creator and attracted a small, niche group of miners at the time. Markus wanted his cryptocurrency to be open to the masses, according to Chohan.
The website nods at the very top to the origin of the joke: the Shiba Inu mascot is the first image on the page, mimicking the meme that inspired him, featuring the same dog surrounded by a ton of Comic Sans text in broken English.
On dogecoin.com, the mascot is captioned, “Dogecoin is an open source peer-to-peer digital currency favored by Shiba Inus worldwide.”
Why is it suddenly so popular?
Dogecoin is no longer a joke. Its popularity has skyrocketed this year, supported in part by the mainstream adoption of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
But Elon Musk is the loudest and most prominent supporter of dogecoin. One of his bizarre tweets to his 50 million followers could cause crypto to skyrocket. That happened 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 has also enjoyed somewhat of cult status on the internet bulletin board Reddit, where a popular group – not unlike the WallStreetBets group behind the GameStop rally – decided earlier this year to propel its value “to the moon”. Dogecoin was up more than 600% in the wake of that push.
Whether it is a smart investment or not remains an active question. The more actively traded and widely accepted bitcoin is subject to extreme volatility, so dogecoin can also crumble without warning. But the increase this year has been astounding.