What is Dogecoin? (DOGE)

Dogecoin is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that was made as a joke but has become one of the most well-known cryptos thanks to its dedicated community.

The iconic Doge meme was the inspiration for a new cryptocurrency created by two software developers in 2013. Dogecoin’s visual representation (a Shiba Inu’s face) and verbal (doge!, etc.), and written conventions all reference the original Doge meme (in Comic Sans font).

Dogecoin has a huge following, even though it was made as a joke. It’s called a “meme coin” because it’s based on a meme, and it’s also become a meme itself. Many of the meme coins that came after it was about dogs, like the Shiba Inu coin (SHIB). Dogecoin’s community has accepted its humble (and funny) beginnings and now has one of the most active communities of any cryptocurrency project.

Dogecoin was developed as a currency. Since Dogecoin is based on Bitcoin’s technology, it shares many of Bitcoin’s features. Like any fiat cash, DOGE can be spent at stores and given to charity.

How was Dogecoin developed?

Late in 2013, cryptocurrencies attracted greater interest than ever before. The term “crypto” was being used for the first time by the general public as the value of Bitcoin on the market as a whole reached unprecedented heights.

In a tweet published on November 28, 2013, a software programmer by the name of Jackson Palmer said, “Investing in Dogecoin, quite sure it’s the next big thing.”It was a joke about how much Bitcoin was going up in price, but it ended up being the start of a new cryptocurrency.

Palmer and another software engineer, Billy Markus, started Dogecoin less than a month later. The two felt that people were taking cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum too seriously and created Dogecoin to poke fun at that mentality.

Markus built Dogecoin in 3 hours using open-source technology from Luckycoin. This time was mostly spent altering the client’s look with Comic Sans font. Dogecoin was re-forked from Bitcoin in 2015 to be more like Litecoin.

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In its first month, over a million people visited Dogecoin.com, and the internet took notice. Buzzfeed published “13 Reasons Dogecoin Is Going to the Moon.” One Reddit member bought a car for 1.5 million DOGE in the first few weeks.

Markus changed his name to Shibetoshi Nakamoto after Palmer left in 2015 and currently advises the Dogecoin Foundation. “Do Only Good Everyday” is Dogecoin’s motto. The Foundation guides the community’s charity missions, such as clean water projects in Kenya and ocean cleanup (or DOGE).

Dogecoin’s price and popularity

Over the years, Dogecoin’s popularity has fluctuated, but in 2019, when billionaire and Tesla CEO Elon Musk discussed DOGE, it received a lot of attention. He referred to Dogecoin as “the future of money” and “an unstoppable financial vehicle that’s going to take over the world” when he appeared on Saturday Night Live in May 2021. It’s possible that this was his most well-known incident.

Since then, he has made DOGE a way to pay for some things on Tesla’s online store. In October 2022, when he had just bought Twitter, he tweeted a picture of a Shiba Inu dog wearing a Twitter t-shirt. This caused the price of DOGE to go up by more than 100%.

How does Dogecoin work?

Dogecoin’s technology comes from other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. It was made through a series of forks, which are updates to blockchains that split one chain into two or more chains.

Dogecoin came from the Luckycoin blockchain, which was a fork of Litecoin, which was itself a fork of Bitcoin. This means that, in a roundabout way, we can trace its lineage all the way back to Bitcoin. But in 2015, when Dogecoin re-forked its blockchain directly from Bitcoin, it gave up on its original model.

Dogecoin is still a lot like Litecoin in many ways. There are a few differences, such as the fact that the block time is shorter, at 1 minute instead of 2.5 minutes. Bitcoin’s block time, on the other hand, is 10 minutes. The code for Dogecoin was changed in this way to make it work better as a currency.

Like the blockchains of other cryptocurrencies, Dogecoin uses Proof of Work (PoW) to process transactions and keep its network safe. In 2014, Dogecoin added merged mining, which lets Litecoin miners mine Dogecoin at the same time. This adds the computing power of Litecoin miners to the Dogecoin blockchain, making it more secure.

How is the DOGE token used?

Dogecoin was made mainly to be used as a currency. Since the beginning, every change to its code has been made to make peer-to-peer transactions go more smoothly.

One of the first things people did with DOGE was given tips online. Before it was shut down in 2017, Reddit’s dogetipbot was a popular way to do this. In order to use this service, one must first sign up for a Dogecoin account through the bot, deposit some DOGE into the account, and then use a simple code like “+/u/dogetipbot 100 DOGE” to send cryptocurrency to another user.

DOGE has stayed a popular way to buy and sell things online. Dogecoin can also be used to pay for goods and services at a number of payment gateways and stores. This includes some items in the Tesla online store, the Ledger online store, and small businesses all over the world.

Also, miners are given DOGE as a reward for keeping the network safe, which is a common thing to do in PoW systems.