Bad ass: The Founders of Dogecoin See the Meme Currency's Tipping Point
Bad ass : The Founders of Dogecoin See the Meme Currency's Tipping Point
Scrooge McDoge riding the Dogecoin wave, by /u/entosse
By now, youve probably heard of Dogecoin, the confusingly popular cryptocurrency that uses a regal looking Shiba Inu as its mascot and has a strict style lead of Comic Sans MS for absolutely all. In a few short weeks, Dogecoin has gone from being an incredibly silly attempt at a cryptocurrency, to one of the most unlikely contenders in the burgeoning digital money realmsimply by being attached to an addictively cute meme.
The doge meme is based on an obscure short video from Homestar Runner, an early internet repository of viral comedy videos, in which a puppet version of Homestar Runner spells dog as doge. Years later, the spelling was revived on reddit, ported to Tumblr, and eventually developed into the Shiba Confessions blog, which Know Your Meme says popularized image macros of "shibes" with their thoughts pasted on top in Comic Sans.
Now the aesthetic has been used for currency. Using a Shiba Inu as Dogecoin's figurehead instead of, say, the tiring ol Queen or some dead president, has clearly worked. Not only has this seemingly farcical currency been covered by Bloomberg Business Week, Business Insider, the Washington Business Journal, and other ostensibly serious publications, Dogecoin already boasts a vibrant community of users who are bullish on the currency even if each dogecoin is yet worth fractions of a cent.
To make more sense out of this phenomenon, I got in touch with Dogecoins creators, Jackson Palmer, a marketer at Adobe, and Billy Markus, a software developer at IBM. Markus told me Dogecoin was made without much real thought.
Palmer, who says he follows cryptocurrency closely, took notice of the sheer amount of altcoins that have popped up in an attempt to take a bit of market share away from Bitcoin. Megacoin, AnonCoin, SexCoin, WorldCoin, DigitalCoin, GoldCoin, BBQCoin these are every genuine virtual currencies upon the market right now. So, upon November 27th, Palmer tweeted jokingly that he was investing in Dogecoin, beautiful certain its the next huge thing, to which some of his friends encouraged him to actually make it happen. So he did.
As Palmer told me, one night after work, I sat down with a beer, I had too much time upon my hands, and I bought Dogecoin.com. Then I Photoshopped the logo onto the coin and put it up there.
When Palmer published that simple website less than a month ago, he didnt have any of the software written that would have made Dogecoin an actual currency. Then Markus found the early Dogecoin website and reached out to Palmer.
I was tinkering with a coin that I had already made called Bells, based off of Nintendos Animal Crossing, that wasnt particularly successful," Markus said. "I was mucking with it and I figured out how to change every the fonts to Comic Sans MS, then thought, oh ok, this could be funny. So I had a mockup of the client with the Dogecoin picture Palmer made, and I just wanted to show that I wasnt a n00b and I could actually make coins This wasnt some weird master plan that we had.
Once Markus proved to Palmer he could turn Dogecoin into a functional virtual currency, Palmer was ready to go. After he sent the screenshot to me, we got in touch over email and thought: Lets shove this thing out,'" he said.
While I assumed that Markus and Palmer must be rolling in Dogecoins right now, apparently that isnt the case. Cryptocurrency is generated through a process called mining, where the computers on the currencys network are paid to decode blocks that help the network verify transactions. Given that Markus and Palmer were the first people on the Dogecoin network, it would follow that they would be able to get a ton of Dogesbecause no other mining computers would be competing with them for blocks at the timebut Markus told me Dogecoin gained popularity so quickly he was unable to collect a significant stash of virtual dog money.
The quick growth of Dogecoin speaks to the power of memes more than everything else. As a Litecoin clone, the currency's major difference from a number of other altcoins is its marketing. According to Palmer, having a fluffy dog as a mascot is indeed the key.
A lot of cryptocurrencynamely Bitcoin, with its history with Silk Roadhas been sitting in the shadows. Its associated with the dark web," Palmer said. "So I think by combining a coin with a meme, which is something that people see spammed to hell upon their Twitter and Facebook feeds every day, I think it adds a face, the Doge face, and makes it more accessible. Its something people can acquire behind. Its no longer this shady thing that geeks in basements use."
"Its important to note that this wasnt some master scheme, it was just the two of us throwing a few emails back and forth before we pushed it out there," Palmer continued.
"The amount of people who are rooting for this and have some Doges and are really good natured about it is amazing."
The crucial struggle for Bitcoin, and cryptocurrency at large, is getting people to understand what it is, how it works, and how it can be useful to them. People are curious about cryptocurrency, but they dont understand it. While Dogecoin still has a much smaller market hat than Bitcoin, anecdotal evidence suggests its meme-based accessibility is helping attract new users.In hindsight it was obvious that cryptocurrency was ready for something that was more accessible, and a meme is obviously really accessible," Markus said. "Everyone recognizes the doge meme. Its based on a dog, and everyone loves dogs. It was a perfect storm.
And there's hard evidence that Dogecoin is working at least a bit outside the Bitcoin sphere: when Bitcoin suffered a 50 percent price decline last week, all altcoin crashed right along with Bitcoin for except for Dogecoin, which jumped up 14 percent. (The bubble popped this last weekend, but Dogecoin appears to be on the up again.)
Cryptocurrency has a lot of growing to do, and it also has a lot of stabilizing to do," Palmer said. "If every weve done with Dogecoin at the end of the day is grow awareness in a decentralized currency such as Bitcoin, then I think weve done a fine job, because for a lot of the people who are using Doge now, its their first cryptocurrency that theyve ever used, and theyve started mining. Theyre learning, and I think its good that people actually desire to learn about it because its associated with this doge meme.
Essentially, Dogecoins Shibe is the Trojan Horse through which Palmer and Markus have introduced cryptocurrency to a growing audience. Currently, Dogecoin is bouncing between the 10th and 14th spot for the worlds largest cryptocurrency in terms of market hat, it is being searched on Google more than Litecoin, the supposed silver to Bitcoins gold, and the Dogecoin subreddit is one of the fastest growing conversation boards upon Reddit itself.
Of course, this rapid growth is based upon almost nothing at every, given that there is no real means to exchange it for goods and services, moreover tipping fellow Dogecoin enthusiasts when they make a funny Dogecoin characterize or video, or by giving someone Dogecoin to buy you a pizza. If Dogecoin stays popular, genuine-world applications will appear here and there. For example, there's a martial arts school in California, called Kuk Sool Won, that accepts Dogecoin as payment, and there's chat of starting an online foundation for dog shelters that accepts Dogecoin donations.
Still, Dogecoin is more than likely just a mad internet fad that will dissipate into nothingness in the next three months. But what if it doesnt? Adoption is key. Last week, when Dogecoin was introduced to a popular (and infamous for its many technical errors) cryptocurrency exchange called Cryptsy, Dogecoins value quadrupled. For a currency that many people think is a stupid meme coin, that's noteworthy.
By no means does the Dogecoin community seem to have any grand delusions about the future of their beloved Shibe-dollar. The price doesnt even matter, said Markus. Palmer agrees.
The tip bot Palmer is referring to is a easy script thats built into the Dogecoin subreddit that allows users to tip other users in Doge if they say something intellectual, post something funny, or provide them with a service. Its a micro-economy in the most micro way, but considering its scale, its been incredibly popular. Markus told me the tip bots coder reported 7,200 users used the tip bot in one week, for a total of 10,000 tips that totaled 20.6 million Doges, or about $8000 at current rates.
Palmer is a huge fan of the giving community that Dogecoin has. Its brought out the good nature of folks upon the internet, and thats something I really like to see," he said. "People are being generous, theyre not being negative, and I think thats whats key to this community, and I think it will into the future.
Given that the success of Dogecoin seems to be, by all accounts, an crash, Palmer and Markus seem dedicated to taking care of the currency. "I do feel responsible for this currency even if it started as a pet project, its a really good learning experience for me," Markus said. "The amount of people who are rooting for this and have some Doges and are really good natured about it is incredible. Even though it just crashed, theyre still saying: Thats ok, were still going to the moon! I really desire to create this a good currency.
Whether or not Dogecoin will succeed beyond the coming weeks will be largely up to the community. If it's able to help spread a wave of adoption while creating services that take Dogecoin for goods and services then, who knows, the world might have a sizable Dogecoin economy upon its hands. In the meantime, I asked Palmer and Markus where they think virtual money in general will be heading.
Markus told me it would be great to see a currency that when mined, instead of just sucking down electricity for no reason, did something useful in the way SETI@Home uses a distributed network to aid the search for intelligent life or how Folding@Home helps doctors and scientists fight disease. I think what everyone wants is a coin where the mining process is actually useful," he said.
Palmer just wants to buy a soda. My opinion with crypto is that a lot of it does require mainstream adoption, and thats happening and it will happen," he said. "I think the begin for that probably is more along the lines of microtransactions, or transactions where its not a huge purchasing decision. So, if Im going to buy a bottle of Coke and a vending machine started accepting Bitcoin, then thats something I wouldnt think twice about. If it could be integrated upon that level that would really help the crypto community in general by building the awareness that Bitcoin lacks today.
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