IT’S TIME TO TALK ABOUT BITCOIN
Hey, let’s talk about Dogecoin. So you might have seen this all over Twitter for the past couple of weeks or months, this seemingly random crypto coming out of nowhere, coming from a few fractions of a penny, all the way up to a few cents on its way to who knows what. Powered by rocket emojis, Sheba news and Elon musk tweets, kind of random. From reading an article from Jessica Wildfire almost 7 months before, some “investors” are just not about to give up.
But in the tech world, it’s been kind of fascinating to watch what’s been going on here.
On this topic, I think I felt like it would make a fun article to sort of unpack how I look at what’s been going on here. This article is not official financial advice.
I’m not an expert.
That’s not the type of thing you should probably get from a blogger anyway. I’m not responsible for anything you may do or decide to do after reading this article.
Okay, Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency. In order to understand basically what’s happening with it, you should understand what cryptocurrencies are. So I’ll just use Bitcoin, the most prominent one as my example here.
Bitcoin has been around since 2009. It’s the most prominent largest crypto by market cap. But to oversimplify, it’s basically a decentralised digital currency.
It’s an unregulated, highly volatile, digital currency built on blockchain.
Of course, Bitcoin is not the only one, there are tonnes of other currencies based on the same thing. Based on alterations of the same rules, they’re alternate coins. They’re called “old coins”.
There’s a lot of them. The thing is, almost anyone can make an alt coin, eventually, like it’s actually fairly impressive how easy it is to make. And so there are tonnes of them. And they’re all built on like different little tweaks and versions of the same fundamentals.
Pretty much, all of them will claim to be better than Bitcoin in some way. Debatable, but there’s a lot of them out there, which is the point.
You might have heard of etherium, Litecoin, stellar ripple, dash, Neo among others. You can literally open up coin base and sort through tonnes and tonnes of them. This is just a small fraction.
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There’s, at this point, I’m going to say probably 1000s of different alt coins to pick from and they’re all basically trying to give you some reason that they’re better than Bitcoin to invest in, or use.
Then there’s Dogecoin.
Dogecoin was literally started as a joke, as a tweet by Jackson Palmer while he was working at Adobe, sort of literally making fun of how many alt coins there were.
The coin had a little picture of the meme on it. It just kind of hooked on a lot and got traction from there. It’s like one of those jokes that catches on so much, it becomes more than the joke. It outgrows itself, and it becomes a real thing.
He collaborated with Billy Marcus from IBM. And they gave it a logo, registered, launched it and ultimately built the thing. And now it’s real.
Okay, fundamentally, we know that Dogecoin is as an alternate crypto, but I think the reason that it’s stuck around for as long as it has is much more interesting to me.
See, the thing you start to notice about cryptocurrencies is they’ll take themselves very seriously.
And they should, because they exist in different worlds for great reasons, actually, I really like the idea of Bitcoin. I think having like a global currency makes sense in the age of the internet we live in, but now that there are so many alt coins, it can feel kind of overwhelming to sort through them all and find out which ones are useful, which ones are good short term, versus long term investments, which ones you can buy, that may actually make you money.
That’s what everyone wants to know.
Everyone kind of like stocks. Everyone wants to find that hidden gem of a young smaller crypto that has just the right combination of things that it’s going to grow and turn into this massive important thing.
That gets people investing in all kinds of small, very young crypto that eventually gets you in the murky waters of possible scams, pump and dump schemes and things that you probably shouldn’t be investing in.
So Dogecoin seems like it’s caught on because it started as a joke, and now people are taking it super seriously, but also kind of as a joke, but also kind of for real.
Does that make sense? So Graham stephan, who knows way more about finance than me, made a really great video about Dogecoin; “The TRUTH About $1 Dogecoin.” Like a dare to go.
He makes a really great point, because it started as a harmless joke.
Because it’s obvious the founders aren’t really doing this for the money. It’s just a sort of a jokey thing in its origin.
It makes it more accessible. It makes it less intimidating. It makes it more likely to succeed because of how obvious it is that they’re not trying and so Graham brings up this thing.
Example of the same thing was someone named Will Rogers, who ran for president in 1928 on a joke campaign, and then eventually resigned. He could have been president. But the whole point of his campaign was to show how dumb it was and mock the whole process.
So that is the Dogecoin of politicians. But I also have an example of the equal but opposite situation. In my own inbox, I get emails about a sponsor potential sponsorship integration. And I say no to 99.999% of the emails that I get about stuff like this, but I always like to hear them out in case there’s potential in this deal.
So I get this email.
This one said they just wanted to tweet and that they already have participation from Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Cerny, Neo, Lil Yachty, and more.
Um, I’m like, all right, that’s an interesting group.
It’s an interesting email. So okay, what is the campaign for and it turned out it’s for Tron a cryptocurrency that they’re, I guess, paying people to tweet about. Clearly they care a lot about people caring about it, if they want Lindsay Lohan to promote it, I guess. I mean, I don’t know whom they get their financial advice from.
But the more I read into this email, the sketchier it is.
They mentioned, they’re often referred to as the etherium killer, whatever they say. And then they need to make it look like it’s not a sponsored tweet. And then they linked three example tweets, one from Lindsay Lohan, Neo and Lil Yachty, which I clicked on, none of which were even marked as an ad by the way.
I’m not trying to call people out on this, but that is pretty cringe behaviour.
The point of me bringing this up is this is the opposite end of the Dogecoin strategy, where they clearly take themselves way too seriously. They have people with stakes in it, paying people to talk about it to hopefully get it more attention and to boost volume and to boost prices.
A strategy like that comes off as so insincere.
Just look at the comments. People are already turned off by it, actually, people kind of hate it. And so Dogecoin on the other hand, is being boosted literally by people online and the owners.
I think they realised that it’s never been meant to be taken that seriously. They have just been using that press and using money they get from it for honestly, the best causes possible.
They’ve used the press to their advantage and have donated gains to meaningful causes like they’ve donated $50,000 to raise awareness of Kenya’s water crisis and Graham Steffen pointed out $25,000 to get the Jamaican bobsled team to the Olympics.
Then lately, of course, Elon Musk seems to be really enjoying it. I mean, he’s always been specifically into naming it on Twitter for a long time anyway. Obviously he’s all in.
If you look at his Twitter over the past month or two, it’s just been all Dogecoin.
If you watch the price and volume of Dogecoin go up, that is the moment he tweets about it. Then it’ll sort of simmer down and die off after a while and then he’ll tweet about it again and it’ll kick up.
I bet if you draw volume graph of how many times people trade and talk about it, it would be right lockstep in line with Elons tweets. That’s just the way it is. But hey, in this world of unregulated decentralised cryptocurrencies that’s fair game.
So at least now we understand the memes about Dogecoin going all the way up to $1.
Do I think it’ll ever get up to $1? Probably not.
But again, this isn’t financial advice.
Anyway, in summary, Dogecoin has caught on as an alt coin, but also as a meme. Not just because people seem to be rallying against Wall Street, and like the Doge himself, I feel like this meme has a longer shelf life than most.
It feels like the currency of internet attention.
As far as if you should invest or not, this article is still not financial advice. So again, I’m not responsible for anything you may do or think about doing after reading what I write.
I think it is actually a fun, harmless cryptocurrency to at least get started with and begin to mess around with the under and the inner workings of how it works, how the trading works, what apps do you like to use things like that?
I wouldn’t invest any money that you’re uncomfortable with turning to $0 because it could. I think once you’re done messing with that, then you can take those learnings and apply it to other future investments because it’s always a good idea to have a diverse set of investments.
That’s financial 101.
In the meantime, it feels good to be in on the joke now. It feels good to understand it. People are going to ride this either to the moon or till it dies. Because that’s what the internet does with every joke.
Thanks for reading. Catch you guys in the next one.
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