That’s right, Dogecoin (DOGE) is the earliest and most representative meme coin, inspired by the most famous Shiba Inu emoji of all time, DOGE.
At its essence, Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency movement that was launched by accident to bring happiness to people; from a technical perspective, it is a completely open source, permissionless, decentralized, peer-to-peer cryptocurrency.
Over the years, Dogecoin has gathered a large number of loyal users, and its core communities are active on Twitter, Reddit, and Discord. This project has the typical genes of altcoins, and was even abandoned by its founder, but its playful comedy features have not harmed its ability to survive in the cryptocurrency world.
Follow this article to get to know Dogecoin. By understanding its way of survival, you may discover another side of the cryptocurrency world.
A world-class joke
From 2012 to 2013, Bitcoin experienced its first surge, soaring from $5 in early January 2012 to $1,000 in November 2013. The market frenzy led to the issuance of a large number of altcoins, but most of them ran away with the money in a short time.
In this context, Jackson Palmer, who was working at Adobe at the time, proposed to create a "non-serious" cryptocurrency to satirize the profit-seeking market as "not fun at all". Inspired by the popular emoticon Shiba Inu DOGE, he wrote on Twitter that he was "investing in Dogecoin and firmly believed it would be the next hit". Billy Markus, an IBM software engineer who saw the post by chance, contacted Palmer, hoping to make it a reality and quickly completed the code construction (in fact, it only took three hours). The two hit it off and decided to work together to create Dogecoin.
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On December 6, 2013, the first Meme coin in history, Dogecoin, was born.
Palmer and Markus jokingly formulated its rules:
Compared to the ten minutes it takes for Bitcoin transactions to be confirmed, they adopted Litecoin’s Scrypt algorithm and reduced Dogecoin’s transaction confirmation time to one minute;
The total amount of Bitcoin is controlled at 21 million, and it needs to be halved every 4 years. The issuance of Dogecoin in the first year was 100 billion, and 5 billion were issued every year. Later, there was no upper limit.
For every Dogecoin block mined, the miner will receive 10,000 DOGE, and soon everyone will be a millionaire!
They even changed the name of mining to "dig" because dogs don't know what mining is, they only know how to dig.
The two founders had no expectations for Dogecoin, thinking it was just a whim. However, thanks to the magical dog head and teasing temperament, Dogecoin attracted the attention of mass social media and forums as soon as it was launched, especially on websites such as Reddit, and it has embarked on a different development path since the first day.
However, even with its popularity, Dogecoin has remained low-priced (around $0.0001), so it is not attractive or susceptible to hype for speculators and centralized institutions chasing high returns.
Reward special currency
Although Dogecoin is not noteworthy in terms of value, it is interesting. Curious netizens heard the news and discovered that Dogecoin was so fun. They quickly formed a community on Reddit and carried out enthusiastic publicity and promotion. For a time, dog head emoticons were overwhelming. In just two weeks, the number of fans on the Dogecoin forum exceeded 1 million. Even before the two founders realized it, someone had already set up a Dogecoin mining pool and peripheral services.
A netizen wrote a Reddit tipping robot program. When an author shared content worthy of encouragement, the robot could send 5 Dogecoins as a tip to express appreciation and affirmation - this is the concept of reward that people are familiar with in the future.
With its extremely fast transaction speed, very low fees, small payments and other technical features, as well as its humorous and cute image, Dogecoin has a natural advantage as a reward coin. Users have used it instead of "likes", with the amount of rewards ranging from hundreds to tens of thousands. Although the actual amount is insignificant, it feels very refreshing. If you use Bitcoin or Ethereum to reward, the gas fee you have to pay may be higher than the value of the tip, and the number does not look generous enough.
The tipping trend not only made Dogecoin popular, but also injected new and interesting gameplay into the platform - who wouldn't like these strange little rewards! In this way, through tipping again and again, Dogecoin has generated liquidity among Reddit users.
As the value of traffic becomes more prominent, more and more platforms are beginning to accept Dogecoin rewards.
Charity activities
Not limited to rewarding, the Dogecoin community has spontaneously organized many rich activities. Members call themselves Shibes on social media, promote the slogan of "Daily Righteousness", and actively participate in public welfare undertakings around the world.
In 2014, the Jamaican bobsleigh team qualified for the Winter Olympics for the first time in ten years, but was unable to go due to insufficient travel expenses. The Dogecoin community spontaneously raised funds to support them to go abroad to compete.
Later, another 67.8 million Dogecoins (equivalent to about 55,000 US dollars at the time) were raised to sponsor grassroots racer Josh Wise to help him participate in the US NASCAR (National Sports Car Racing, "F1" for Americans).
Wise spray-painted the Dogecoin logo on his race car
On World Water Day, we once again raised $30,000 to build wells in Kenya, Africa, to solve the local drinking water problem.
Although the amount is not large, the Dogecoin community has always been committed to practicing the value of conveying kindness through practical actions and has accumulated a lot of goodwill.
DOGE prototype Japanese Shiba Inu Kabosu, the Dogecoin Foundation built a commemorative bronze statue for it
Community self-governance
In less than two years, founders Palmer and Markus withdrew from the development of Dogecoin, but the community did not disband. More than 40 collaborative contributors formed a new development team, and there has always been a shortage of volunteers involved.
In fact, as an old altcoin born in 2013, Dogecoin has not only survived, but has become one of the few survivors. Such a unique performance is due to community autonomy.
Initially, Dogecoin was intended to break the seriousness of the global cryptocurrency narrative and create a "fun and friendly Internet currency." After the two founders went into hiding, the Dogecoin community innovated through self-governance and brainstorming, forming a unique autonomous atmosphere and creating a new paradigm for the development of Meme coins.
As one of the most influential supporters of Dogecoin, the president of Tesla and SpaceX, the "icon-level figure" Elon Musk once tweeted that Dogecoin is one of his favorite digital currencies. The community did not miss this good opportunity to play a prank, and after voting, he was elected as the CEO of Dogecoin with an absolute advantage. Musk himself was also happy to accept this prank and began to frequently "promote" Dogecoin.
Dogecoin was born as a joke. It has gone through the test and trials of the market, and through community autonomy, it has formed a good community atmosphere and created a higher community consensus and intrinsic value: helping each other, spreading goodwill, bringing some fun to society, and turning absurdity into reality.
How to Get Dogecoin
There are currently many ways to obtain Dogecoin, such as purchasing it from an exchange, tipping it through social platforms, or obtaining it through mining.
As a derivative of Litecoin's Scrypt algorithm, Dogecoin originally only needed a GPU computer to mine. But since the addition of ASIC mining machines, the computing power of the entire network has soared, and mining alone has become very difficult.
To avoid competition and reduce security risks, Dogecoin developers switched to a joint mining model, which allows merged mining with other cryptocurrencies that share the same Scrypt algorithm. For example, Litecoin miners can earn Dogecoin while mining.
Dogecoin has had an uncapped supply since February 2014 and has more than 100 billion in circulation. The community believes that having no limit is a good choice, which will effectively encourage people to spend rather than hoard Dogecoin and prevent early adopters from getting excessive returns.
The Current State of Dogecoin
As the result of an accidental planting, more and more people are beginning to realize that Dogecoin has the potential to become an efficient and practical currency. Under the surface full of jokes and memes, there is a solid foundation of practicality, such as the tipping feature that has existed since its birth.
After years of development, it has become possible to use Dogecoin to make purchases in online stores. With the integration of Dogecoin payments into third-party payments such as BitPay and Coinbase and some prepaid card providers that support Dogecoin, Dogecoin is becoming more and more "like currency".
Recently, Company X (Twitter) announced that it will soon launch a payment function, continuing to move towards a "universal application". The payment function is initially planned to support only legal tender, but as development proceeds, it may support cryptocurrency asset payments in the future, which coincides with Musk's enthusiasm for Dogecoin.
In this round of market speculation on ETFs, the approval of the Ethereum ETF is undoubtedly a milestone moment, opening a new channel for many cryptocurrencies. Many people believe that the Dogecoin ETF is also "feasible."
As of writing, Dogecoin has a market cap of $17.9 billion and ranks seventh on the Binance exchange.
