dogecoin g4ed0a06ad 1920It’s the world we live in. A meme can become a genuine, serious currency used to buy, sell, invest and gamble with.
Dogecoin started as a joke. At the very least, it could be described as tongue in cheek. In this guide, we’re explaining the history of the currency and how this funny little meme coin has become a currency that can be used in a variety of different dogecoin casinos or to order real items online.
Dogecoin is pretty mainstream now in the world of crypto. There are even spin offs such as Dogelon Mars that you may have come across, but the origin of the currency is almost ten years old now and is worth exploring.
The joke that took off
Dogecoin began when Jackson Palmer, while working for Adobe, observed how unusual and strange the crypto industry was. This was also at a time that some currencies were blowing up very quickly. He used the meme of the Doge, a Shiba Inu, and the world of crypto to make a funny website on dogecoin.com which had the meme photoshopped onto the coin. All he said on the site was: “if you want to make dogecoin a reality, get in touch.”
Someone did. Software engineer Billy Markus used the open-source code that Bitcoin provided to create a joke coin.
Markus started with 100bn DOGE available and changed the “mining” process to “digging” because that is what dogs do.
Markus has explained the process in interviews: “It took me about 3 hours to do it, and most of that time I made modifications to change the text to comic sans, customize some graphics, and change the wording of different parts of the user interface.”
Like many viral memes, Dogecoin owes a lot of its circulation to Reddit, which helped to grow the currency by popularizing “tipping” or rewarding other people’s comments with Dogecoin. It became massive almost overnight and had a market value at the time of around $8m.
Some very cool examples of guerrilla marketing, or just examples of friends having a laugh, include the Dogecoin team helping to fund the Jamaican bobsled team. They had heard the team qualified but didn’t have enough money to attend, so they made a Dogecoin address and asked for people to donate. They got $25,000 and were able to send the team to the Olympic games.
Since then, there have been a few other events that have helped to turn the currency into a mainstream one. Elon Musk’s support has certainly been controversial, but there are many ways that the coin has made the news and this has led to it having an absolutely huge market cap. At times, it has reached $90bn in value in total.
Is Dogecoin a real cryptocurrency?
There are a few elitists out there who like to claim that some currencies are somehow more real than others. The truth is that Dogecoin has become a very viable crypto.
Many places accept the currency, which means that you can gamble, exchange, donate and do whatever you want with the currency. Investors have seen some fluctuations in the value, as is true with a variety of different cryptocurrencies, but Dogecoin’s high profile nature means that a lot of people hold some in their cryptocurrency portfolio.
Crypto includes many types of currency and they are all very different in terms of their technology. The way that Dogecoin works uses some of the earlier open-source code from Bitcoin and it is certainly safe and secure to use.
Due to the way the currency started, some see it as a joke or even as a criticism of the cryptocurrency industry, but this isn’t the case at all. The proof is in the fact that you can use crypto as you can a variety of different currencies.
For investors, the public interest around this currency means it is one of the more volatile out there. One day it can be thrust into the spotlight, and this can lead to a huge swell in value, and over time, it can also drop significantly. It’s best not to put all your eggs in one basket in this game, and Dogecoin deserves its reputation for being volatile, but that can lead to opportunity as well as risk. It’s a big step for something that started as a bit of a joke.
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