- Dogecoin, a digital Crypto originally founded as a joke, has soared over 1800% after a Reddit board talked about making it the cryptocurrency equivalent of GameStop.
Dogecoin (DOGE) did originally start as a joke but over time has left a noticeable mark on the world of cryptocurrency.
Australian creator, Jackson Palmer was looking at CoinMarketCap and a meme of Doge, based on the famous Shiba Inu and using the comic sans font, at the same time and tweeted the idea as a joke.
Palmer was encouraged by colleagues from Adobe Systems’ marketing department in Sydney to make the joke a reality. Palmer then purchased the domain name dogecoin.com.
He then continued the joke believing that it would eventually fade away with co-founder Billy Markus, a programmer from Portland, USA, who reached out to him online.
The idea was to be as ridiculous as possible. They even had the idea of having random block rewards from 0 to 1 million every time a block was mined.
The duo was surprised that it didn’t die down as a joke and eventually, the two saw Dogecoin as a way to reach a wider demographic than Bitcoin and a strong culture grew around the coin and the meme.
Want to invest in Dogecoin like a pro? check out eToro!
Elon Mush and Dogecoin
"Mr Musk is with Dogecoin investors to the moon.”
Elon Musk has tweeted about dogecoin in the past and indicated in April 2019, that it was his “best cryptocurrency.”
On Thursday, he tweeted out a picture of a magazine cover of Dogue. Many users on Twitter and Reddit took that to mean Musk was throwing his support behind the doge rally.
Tesla Chairman Elon Musk tweeted a photo of the magazine cover of the "Dogue" on Thursday — a play with a common title of the "Vogue," trend, which was played on Twitter and Reddit.
The tweets of Musk tend to influence his fans or people in general. Similarly, he urgently encouraged his fans to using a "Use Signal," on Twitter, and millions of others flocked to the message site.
He also said that a potential Mars economy, such as Bitcoin, will be focused on cryptocurrencies. Musk was tweeting last month "One word: Doge," to his 40 million followers. He added also "Mars economy will run on crypto," by replying to a tweet.
In addition, Musk on the early Friday morning added #bitcoin to his Twitter profile.
What has happened to Dogecoin Price ?
Dogecoin, the digital meme currency, increased by 800% as the rate of trade expanded rapidly.
WallStreetBets' "chairman,'' wrote Thursday on Twitter, "Has Doge ever been to a dollar?" A few hours later, a million people joined Satoshis Street Bets and wrote about "taking doge to the moon."
Has Doge ever been to a dollar?
— WSB Chairman (@WSBChairman) January 28, 2021
The subreddit “WallStreetBets” community in Reddit caused the battling electronic retailer Gamestop to increase by almost 2,000%. The Redditors have boosted the stock price, slightly beating hedge funds on Wall Street.
However, sources specify that Redditor’s Dogecoin drive on the site as it did with Gamestop have no shortcuts. People strive, therefore, to earn extra profit by driving the cryptocurrency.
Software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer built Dogecoin, starting it as a joke in 2013. The digital currency logo is based on the famous meme used by a Shiba Inu dog at the time. A Shiba Inu is the Dogecoin emblem.
How does Dogecoin work?
Dogecoin was created when Markus forked Luckycoin which is now inactive and was originally a fork of Litecoin, which is a fork of Bitcoin.
It uses a different proof of work algorithm than Bitcoin and is fairly similar to Litecoin in how it works. In fact, all modifications and updates made on Litecoin will also be made on Dogecoin.
Although Dogecoin doesn’t support smart contracts, it is cheap and fast. Some people even use Dogecoin to transfer money between exchanges because it has low transaction fees and is quite fast.
Dogecoin mining is an expensive process and takes a lot of time, something Palmer is not happy about as it is not good for the environment.
It has also been set up so mining Dogecoin gets more difficult over time. However, after the 600,000th block was mined there has been a permanent reward of 10,000 per block.
Dogecoin also doesn’t have a total cap. This was done to ensure miners kept working on the project and not leave if the total supply was reached.
This also means that extremely high transaction times can be avoided as there is always an incentive to mine.
Most other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, do have a total cap on the number of coins and when that cap is reached, people will likely stop using them.
In this sense, this could mean that Dogecoin could outlive many other cryptocurrencies.
Like many other cryptocurrencies, Dogecoin also has a public ledger, meaning old transactions cannot be erased.
Dogecoin also has merged mining with Litecoin.
What is Dogecoin trying to achieve?
As Dogecoin started to be taken more seriously, the team behind it started to develop ideas about what it should achieve.
It became clear that the ideology behind Dogecoin should be simple; to create an easy to use cryptocurrency, not something technologically impressive.
Palmer believes the most important thing for a cryptocurrency to do is to be able to process payments.
For him, cryptocurrencies that pay people for services, such as watching advertisements or other concepts that are very new aren’t a good idea because they haven’t been tested yet with fiat money and people are not used to the idea yet.
Cryptocurrencies need to give people tangible use cases, such as buying everyday items. Unless this is done, people won’t adopt it.
To achieve this, making payments needs to be as efficient as possible.
Dogecoin also started to be used as a tipping system, where people tipped people online for the content that they enjoyed.
Members of the Dogecoin community are referred to as ‘Shibes’. Many of them found Dogecoin appealing because it wasn’t as serious and political as most other cryptocurrency projects.
The Dogecoin community is well-known to have performed various acts on charity.
One of the most notable charity causes was when Dogecoin worked with charity: water, a non-profit organisation that aims to deliver drinking water to people in developing nations.
The community managed to raise the equivalent of $30,000 to build a well in Kenya.
Other noteworthy events include the 2014 Winter Olympics where the community attempted to raise $50,000 for the Jamaican bobsled team and sponsored NASCAR driver Josh Wise who drove a Dogecoin-themed car.
The community has been noted as very supporting. On the 25th of December 2013, a hack took place where many Dogecoin holders had their coins stolen.
Dogecoin started an initiative called ‘SaveDogemas’ and managed to raise enough to cover what was stolen.
There is also a common phrase in the Dogecoin community that states ‘1 DOGE = 1 DOGE’, which implies that Dogecoin should only be used for transactions and not as an investment.
There is also a future project to bridge Ethereum with Dogecoin (Dogethereum) so it can be used on the Ethereum blockchain as an ERC 20 token.
Palmer left Dogecoin and Billy Markus is now the primary figure behind its development.
Crypto asset investing is highly volatile and unregulated in some EU countries. No consumer protection. Tax on profits may apply.
How has Dogecoin performed?
Like many other cryptocurrencies, Dogecoin is relatively volatile.
At the time of writing, Dogecoin has a market capitalisation of $39.489B and there are 120,801,435,050 (120 billion) coins in circulation, according to CoinMarketCap.
The large block reward of 10,000 coins per block mined is likely the reason why Dogecoin’s market capitalisation is quite low.
When Dogecoin was first introduced, it was relatively high against Bitcoin while the US dollar remained low.
This may suggest that most people where trading Bitcoin against Dogecoin, but not against the US dollar.
On top of that, it is also worth considering that by 2015, 100 billion Dogecoins had already been mined, which is most of the coins which are in circulation today.
Looking at Dogecoin historically, it has already gone through numerous peaks against Bitcoin, often shooting up dramatically and then gradually decreasing in price.
In January 2014, Dogecoin even briefly surpassed Bitcoin and all other cryptocurrencies in terms of trading volume.
Dogecoin only started to get major traction against the US dollar in April 2017. It then reached a market cap of almost $2.8 billion in January 2020, which was the largest market cap it has ever reached.
Will Dogecoin meet such highs again?
This is yet to be seen.
After reaching its highest point of $2 billion, Dogecoin has gained more value against the US dollar and seems to be repeating the same movements - shooting up and then slowly declining.
It is also important to remember that many market experts believe the cryptocurrency market is a lot more mature these days and so reaching the same highs may not happen.
Then again, other cryptocurrency enthusiasts believe another, much larger cryptocurrency bubble is likely to take place.
If it does, prices may surge once more before dropping tremendously.
It should also be noted that Dogecoin is the most successful cryptocurrency based on a meme (meme coin).
If it continues to remain as a way to tip people online for their content, this may also raise its value.
Why has the Price of Dogecoin Increased?
Dogecoin, according to CoinMarketCap, has increased by about 40% over the last 24 hours to $0.30.
It comes from a bunch of Reddit posts that demand a $1 coin value.
The goal is to represent the recent increase in share in companies like GameStop, which are largely short.
Source: CoinMarketCap
After an army of amateur traders attacked the business, the markets rocked, leading to a loss of billions from experienced hedge funds. But the boom saw the novice traders pay a lot of money.
In short, when experienced investors borrow stocks for sale and then repurchase them at a lower price, a "short selling" sale is easy.
They effectively bet that the stock would be lowered in value to pocket the benefit when handed over to the corporation from which it has borrowed.
To illustrate one thing, the WallStreetBets group on Reddit has agreed to take the hedging fund by acquiring GameStop stocks earlier rather than later.
However, the hedge fund has yet to repay its lent stock, which ultimately cost them millions to repay the equity at a very high amount.
After GameStop's surge in share funds, Reddit users in other posts referenced the attempts of WallStreetBet to squeeze out Wall Street hedge funds.
One post called "Dogecoin is next GME/Bitcoin."
And added, "Completely change the crypto market… Dogecoin to the moon."
Dogecoin has got a boost after tweeting it from a "WSB Chairman" account that maintains it is not connected to the Reddit community.
Furthermore, Tesla founder Elon Musk recently drew attention to the crypto-currency, which in December sent the valuation to increase.
On Twitter, he just said, "One word: Doge."
Is Dogecoin worth investing in?
Dogecoin can be a good investment and worth considering. Its transfer speed is much faster than bitcoin.
If you are a believer that smart contracts and other features such as dApps are not that important, then it may be a good investment.
In that arena, Dogecoin does perform well. It is fast and cheap to use.
Dogecoin may be more useful for traders to store value in when switching between exchanges or when the market is very volatile.
If Dogecoin adopts more features, this will likely improve the price.
However, it seems that Dogecoin’s strengths lie mostly in spreading awareness of cryptocurrency and remaining resilient to change.
That said, it does have value in that it can be used for tipping as it is very fast. Not having a token cap also keeps miners incentivised to continue working.
Plus, it is worth noting that the community around Dogecoin do not want it to be used in such a way but as a real currency.
So is Dogecoin a good investment? Yes, Dogecoins is considered as a strong investment by many investors, which is why its price has increased sharply.
Digitalcoin predicts that Dogecoin could go as high as $0.090 by June 2021. Moreover, by June 2024 it predicts that Dogecoin could reach $0.164.
Previzioni Bitcoin is even more optimistic predicting the price of Dogecoin, as they believe that DOGE could reach $0.27 by December 2021 and reach $0.42 in 2022.
Although launched as a joke, Dogecoin now seems to be taken seriously by investors and the crypto community.
Crypto asset investing is highly volatile and unregulated in some EU countries. No consumer protection. Tax on profits may apply.
Should You Add Dogecoin To Your Portfolio?
Regardless of Dogecoin's relative weakness in the last two years, the total growth in the valuation of encryption assets has benefited Dogecoin. Besides, the once common Altcoin is back on the map and in crypto-investor discussions with the latest Dogetherum project.
If this project works, the price of altcoin will bode well. Dogecoin often profits from smaller exchange charges than many of its colleagues, making it a viable digital asset for expenditures and sending.
Given the long-standing status of Dogecoin in cryptocurrency fields, there are promising initiatives with greater potential for crypto-currency than Dogecoin. Therefore, in the expectation that the Dogethereum Project will raise rates, if you buy Dogecoin, it should be a small business in your crypto-assets portfolio.
Key points
If you remember anything from this article, make it these key points.
- Dogecoin, a digital Crypto originally founded as a joke, has soared over 800% after a Reddit board talked about making it the cryptocurrency equivalent of GameStop.
- The price of Dogecoin has soared, by 12000% in 2021, as Reddit investors set their sights on digital currencies.
- Traders use Dogecoin to transfer crypto to other exchanges. Because it is relatively fast and cheap to use.
- Dogecoin has been very successful in spreading awareness of cryptocurrency. For many, it introduced them to what cryptocurrency is.
Invest in Dogecoin with eToro
eToro have proven themselves trustworthy within the Crypto industry over many years – we recommend you try them out.
Crypto asset investing is highly volatile and unregulated in some EU countries. No consumer protection. Tax on profits may apply.
If you enjoyed reading Is Dogecoin A Real Investment Or A Joke? please share it with anyone else you think it may be of interest too.
Read More:
What Are The Best Cryptocurrencies To Trade In 2021?
7 Cryptocurrency Predictions for 2021 That Everybody Would Agree With