Dogecoin story
You know, bitcoin copycats, they take it, they change a variable and then they, you know, release it to the world. And so I was like, this seems a little shady. Also happening back in , this Internet meme called Doge. It was a picture of a dog, a shiba inu, and it had this goofy, Comic Sans writing all around it with grammatically challenged phrases like, such wow, and, much amaze. I had one browser tab open with this article about Doge, and right next to it, I had CoinMarketCap, which is a very popular website for checking the valuations of cryptocurrencies.
So my tab names kind of almost spelled it out for me, in a way. He chuckled about it and sent off a tweet.
And then he started hearing from all these people who were like, dogecoin? A friend of his in the tech industry is like, what the hell, let's make dogecoin a real thing. It's easy to make a new cryptocurrency, and it'll be, like, a fun project to understand how this stuff really works. And so they created dogecoin. And then the price of dogecoin starts to take off. And then we were like, oh, no. Like, this thing stands to become the joke that we were making.
So Jackson and his partner decide, let's try to use dogecoin for good. On the dogecoin subreddit, they started suggesting giving dogecoins to charity. And then someone was like, hey, I heard the Jamaican bobsled team is trying to raise money.
We thought, well, that's just as ridiculous as a dog on a coin. So sure, why not? They donated dogecoin to train guide dogs, to drill wells in Kenya. Things were going great - until they weren't. In , someone convinced a lot of people to invest a lot of dogecoin in a new, shady cryptocurrency business. That business collapsed, and people lost their money. He gave away all the dogecoin he had to charity. And then last year, along with lots of other cryptocurrencies, the price of dogecoin skyrocketed again.
The total value of all the dogecoins out there reached more than a billion dollars at its peak. Even Dogecoin is rallying in this cryptocurrency boom. Having a four-year-long history in the world of crypto is a big deal, and as Dogecoin's following got stronger, its price steadily increased. That has set off some alarm bells among people in the cryptocurrency community, including Palmer.
But here's the deal: Dogecoin does not offer many significant technological advantages over Bitcoin. And it's not something that's seen any improvement, having not received a significant update in years.
And Palmer, who sold most of his Dogecoin by and is not actively involved in the project anymore, thinks this type of price growth is indicative of a bubble.
It's not just about Dogecoin, though. After an article in crypto-oriented media outlet Coindesk focused on Palmer's comments on Dogecoin, he posted an expanded statement on Twitter. As a result, we're seeing even highly centralized assets such as Ripple achieve extremely high valuations, despite their lack of technological innovation and misalignment with the original vision of Bitcoin," he wrote.