The digital currency that started as a joke is now one of the biggest digital currencies in the world.
Dogecoin — which is like Bitcoin but inspired by the absurdist Doge meme — now has a "market cap" of $62 million according to CoinMarketCap.com. When Rob Wile told the story of how Dogecoin came together back in December, the value of all extant Dogecoins were just $8 million.
And it's not hard to see why Dogecoin is taking off. The community has done cool things, like help send the Jamaican Bobsled team to the Olympics. The community is also helping send athletes from India to the Sochi games.
Meanwhile, the community is incredibly motivated and evangelical, but not in an annoying way.
After I tweeted yesterday about the surging value of Doge, a bunch of its fans instantly offered to tip me a bunch (give me some of theirs):
@tipdoge tip @TheStalwart 10 #Dogecoin #ToTheMoon
— JD Raimer (@jdraimer) January 31, 2014
@tipdoge tip @TheStalwart 50 doges, thats how we got there buddy
— Enigmatic (@ThatDudeMatic) January 31, 2014
@tipdoge tip @TheStalwart 8.0085 doge
— Adjam (@JollyJap3s) February 1, 2014
@tipdoge tip @TheStalwart 20 doge
— Lord Matt of Sealand (@_DragonFiesta) February 1, 2014
When I've written about cryptocurrencies in the past, I've argued that an important facet of them is as a social network. A social network as you think about it (like Twitter or Facebook) only has value because lots of other people you know are using them. The technology itself can easily be copied. It's the same with digital currencies. It's the social aspect and network affects that creates the value, since the actual code is easily replicated.
The Doge community isn't likely to become a "mass" thing, but it seems to attract fun people that are into doing cool things. It's not that weird to see why it's taken off so much.
