Tech

Dogecoin Is Sending The Jamaican Bobsled Team To The Winter Olympics

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fans, rejoice! 

The news broke on Sunday that the Jamaican bobsled team has qualified to go to the Winter Olympics in Sochi and the forces of the Internet are coming together to help raise money to send the team to Russia after member Winston Watt set up a PayPal account to raise $40,000.

At the front of the fundraising efforts, Reddit's community of Dogecoin enthusiasts have collected about $30,000 of the hot virtual currency

So many people donated, that, in 12 hours, the Dogecoin to Bitcoin exchange rate rose by 50%.

The dogecoins were converted into bitcoins, then exchanged for dollars, then sent to the Jamaican team, according to an update on the Reddit post

This is the first time that the Jamaican team has qualified for the Winter Olympics since 2002. 

(Hat-tip to The Verge, where we first spotted this story.)

 

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Jillian was most recently an enterprise technology editor based in San Francisco.  She started at Insider as an intern on the technology desk in 2013 and rose to a senior reporter position, covering Alphabet, Facebook, and ecommerce. After three years at the site, she left to spend time freelance writing abroad, before taking reporting positions at CNBC and then at Forbes, where she covered Alphabet, Silicon Valley culture, and artificial intelligence. She returned to Insider in March 2020 and worked on the enterprise technology desk until August 2021.  Jillian graduated from Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications with a degree in magazine journalism and information management and technology.