Bitcoin price is currently hovering around the $60,000 mark, and other cryptocurrencies appear to be indirectly benefiting from the price balance. One of them is Dogecoin, whose promotion has largely come from Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Going back to some time around 2010, Bitcoin enthusiasts nudged for a need to create personalized magical internet money to freely get rich. How did they do it? They copied Bitcoin software, tweaked some details, and subsequently launched a new coin that can be traded for Bitcoin. Dogecoin came to light as an imitation of Litecoin, which was a changed copy of Bitcoin.
Created as a joke of cryptocurrency, with its name stemming from an internet meme called “Doge”, Dogecoin was launched in December 2013, at the peak of Bitcoin’s first breakthrough. The original idea behind the creation of Dogecoin was to make folly of a cryptocurrency that was considerably cheap to lack significant value.
Dogecoin fans, popularly called “shibes”, did gather on the Reddit forum to make a joke of Dogecoin by tipping themselves the coin over funny comments. With the growing fan base, the forum had a foray into charity. The forum raised about $30,000 of dogecoins in January 2014 to avail the Jamaican bobsled team of participation at the 2014 Winter Olympics. Also, an initiative, Doge4Water raised $32,000 to provide potable water in Kenya. As interesting as these charity outreaches were, Dogecoin was created to be sold for Bitcoin, and the Bitcoin was sold for dollars.
Starting up as a digital currency with no sense of vision and mission, the shibes started itching for a fortune to be made from the coin for free and these led to the hucksters moving in. However, Dogecoin hit a debacle when a cryptocurrency exchange in the United Kingdom, Moolah defrauded a large number of Dogecoin investors in 2014. The impostor with the true identity of Ryan Kennedy was a serial scammer who was able to leverage the loopholes of the crypto transaction to elope with funds raised through his scam startups.
This event was a major blow to Dogecoin at the crucial time its founders wanted to get serious into the business. The aftermath was devastating as the founder was driven away while the remaining Dogecoin community recovered. But Dogecoin fans continued playing with their coin in obscurity with the world.
Due to the misadventure, work on the Dogecoin code was brought to an abrupt end, and the software barely had maintenance. With a downturn fate in the crypto market space, Dogecoin was just an Altcoin, characterized by a low volume, a useless token that gamblers and peasant traders could swap for other cryptocurrencies to make a few pence.
In mid-2021, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted a mocked-up magazine cover called DOGUE and put “$DOGE” in his Twitter bio. This led to a skyrocketed price for Dogecoin but crashed the next day. Nonetheless, the price of Dogecoin has to an extent soared following some attention shown to the coin by Elon Musk.
In an open letter to Dogecoin by one of the founders, Billy Markus on February 8, he admonished the Dogecoin community to go back to the fun and folly past of coin by doing away with the reality that Dogecoin must be about making money. He said, “Keep educating yourself as much as you can on how cryptocurrency works, how these markets work, never risk more than you could safely lose, be vigilant and aware.”
