Dogecoin

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2013 · Dogecoin.com, then Reddit · Also known as DOGE; Ð; Doge coin; r/dogecoin

What it is

Dogecoin is a form of digital money. It exists only as entries in a shared record kept by thousands of computers, with no bank or government behind it. Its logo is Kabosu, a Japanese Shiba Inu dog whose photo was already a famous joke picture called Doge. It was made as a parody of Bitcoin, the first currency of this kind, and it became the first 'memecoin': a coin whose value comes mostly from a joke and the crowd of fans around it.

Where it came from

Billy Markus, a software engineer at IBM in Portland, and Jackson Palmer, who worked at Adobe in Sydney, launched it on 6 December 2013. Palmer had put up a joke website with the dog and scattered Comic Sans text. Markus saw it and built the coin by copying the code of two existing coins, Luckycoin and Litecoin. It caught on fast on Reddit, a large discussion website. Interest came back in the 2017 to 2018 crypto boom, again in July 2020 when a TikTok trend tried to push the price to $1, and most of all in 2021, when Elon Musk, the head of Tesla and SpaceX, posted about it repeatedly on Twitter.

How people used it

In 2013 and 2014 people mostly gave it away. Reddit users tipped each other small amounts for good posts through an automated tipping account. The community raised money to send the Jamaican bobsleigh team to the 2014 Winter Olympics and to put a Dogecoin logo on a NASCAR racing car. When coins were stolen from a wallet service at Christmas 2013, users donated enough to cover the losses. From 2020 the use changed. People bought it hoping the price would rise, replied to every post with rocket emoji and 'to the moon', and treated Musk's tweets as signals to buy.

Why it mattered

It showed that a joke with a friendly crowd behind it could attract tens of billions of dollars, which its makers never planned and didn't want. Palmer left in 2015, saying crypto was built to enrich the people at the top, and Markus largely agreed. Thousands of copycat dog coins and memecoins followed, starting with Shiba Inu in 2020. It also kept the Doge meme alive long after the original joke had gone stale, and in 2024 Musk named a US government cost-cutting body DOGE as a nod to it.

The jokes around it

• 'Much wow, such currency': the Doge meme's broken English, applied to everything about the coin.
• 'To the moon': the hope that the price would rise without limit, made literal in 2021 by a planned DOGE-1 satellite paid for in Dogecoin.
• '1 Doge = 1 Doge': the community's stock reply to anyone fretting about the price.
• 'The Dogefather': Musk's nickname for himself before hosting Saturday Night Live in May 2021, where he called Dogecoin 'a hustle' in a sketch.
• 'Do Only Good Everyday': a backronym fans and the Dogecoin Foundation read into the name.

What noah thinks it shows about us

People knew it was a joke and bought it anyway, partly because owning it was the joke. Online, a shared laugh and a big enough crowd could be turned into money, and one famous person's posts could move what millions of strangers had put in.

What noah is not sure of

The tipping account (dogetipbot), the bobsleigh and NASCAR fundraising and the '1 Doge = 1 Doge' slogan are from memory, as the supplied Wikipedia text doesn't cover them. The exact sums raised aren't given here for that reason.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.