What is Dogecoin? How a joke was made more than bitcoin

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The total value of dogecoins in circulation is nearly $ 50 billion, which is bad for a digital currency that started out as a joke.

According to CoinMarketCap, it is the No. 5 most valuable cryptocurrency in the market, which has risen more than 6,000% this year.
The price of a dogecoin doubled again later Friday Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk tweeted about it for the umpteenth time (more on that in a bit). Dogecoin demand rose so much this week, that it briefly broke Robinhood’s cryptocurrency trading system.

Like all cryptocurrencies, dogecoin is a digital currency that can be bought and sold as an investment and spent as money.

Although each cryptography is unique, it shares some similarities with its better-known peers: its code is based on litecoin writing, for example. But it has a couple of key differences.

Unlike bitcoin, which has set 21 million as the finite amount of digital currency, dogecoin has 129 billion coins in circulation and will continue to make new currency blocks available to each block. This is part of the reason why a dogecoin is currently valued at about three tenths and a bitcoin is worth about $ 62,000.

Although cryptocurrencies are gaining more acceptance as a currency for buying goods, dogecoin does not have widespread use in the real world. It has a number of market niches, including the use of dogecoin to tip online artists.

A 16-year-old, with the help of Reddit, got the number 98 sponsored by Dogecoin for a race on the famous Talledega Superspeedway.

And its main differentiator, its active online community, is what makes weird currency so much fun. The group, which is active on Reddit, has raised money (in dogecoin, of course) for charitable causes, and in 2014 successfully funded sponsorship to get Nascar driver Josh Wise to advertise dogecoin in his car.

“Dogecoin is not so much an alternative deflationary numismatic instrument as a relaxed inflationary exploration of building communities around a cryptocurrency,” Usman Chohan, an economist at the University of New South Wales, wrote in a paper updated in February on digital currency.

How did it start?

Dogecoin was created on December 6, 2013 by a couple of software engineers as a joke.

Billy Markus, an IBM programmer in Portland, Oregon, decided to differentiate his bitcoin cryptography, which was steeped in mystery with an anonymous creator and at the time attracted a small group of miners. Markus wanted his cryptocurrency to be open to the masses, according to Chohan.

Markus sought help to make his strange dream come true and found Jackson Palmer, for whom he worked Adobe (ADBE). Palmer bought the dogecoin.com domain: a gesture with the “doge” meme that was around the world at the time.

The website points out its origins as a joke at the top: its pet Shiba Inu is the first image on the page, mimicking the meme that inspired it, featuring the same dog surrounded by lots of Comic text Sans in broken English.

On dogecoin.com, his pet is titled, “Dogecoin is a peer-to-peer open source digital currency, favored by Shiba Inus around the world.”

Why is it so popular all of a sudden?

Dogecoin is no longer a joke. Its popularity has increased – astronomically this year -, driven in part by the widespread adoption of bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies.

But Elon Musk is the strongest and most prominent supporter of dogecoin. One of his weird tweets to his 50 million followers can grow cryptography. This 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 has also enjoyed cult status on the Reddit Internet message board, where a popular group – unlike the WallStreetBets group behind the GameStop rally – decided earlier this year to boost its value. “to the moon.” Dogecoin soared more than 600% as a result of this boost.

Whether it is a smart investment or not is still an active issue. The most traded and most accepted bitcoin is subject to extreme volatility, so dogecoin could also crumble without warning. But its increase this year has been impressive.

Markus, who does not benefit from the growing growth of the currency he sold all his dogecoin when he was fired in 2015. He used it to buy a Honda Civic.

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