Dogecoin

Dogecoin  : DOGE, symbol: Ð) is a  cryptocurrency  created by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, who decided to create a payment system as a joke, making fun of the wild speculation in cryptocurrencies at the time. Despite its satirical nature, some consider it a legitimate investment prospect. Dogecoin features the face of the  shiba lnu dog from the "Doge"  meme as its logo and namesake. It was introduced on December 6, 2013, and quickly developed its own online community , reaching a market capitalization of US$85,314,347,523 on May 5, 2021.

Dogecoin.com promotes the currency as the "fun and friendly internet currency", referencing its origins as a joke.

Originally formed as a joke, Dogecoin was created by IBM software engineer Billy Markus and Adobe  software engineer Jackson Palmer. They wanted to create a peer-to-peer digital currency that could reach a broader demographic than  Bitcoin . In addition, they wanted to distance it from the controversial history of other coins. Dogecoin was officially launched on December 6, 2013, and within the first 30 days, there were over a million visitors to Dogecoin.com.

Palmer is credited with making the idea a reality. At the time, he was a member of the Adobe system ,  marketing department in  Sydney .Palmer had purchased the domain Dogecoin.com and added a splash screen, which featured the coin's logo and scattered comic sans  text. Markus reached out to Palmer after seeing the site, and started efforts to develop the currency. Markus had designed Dogecoin's protocol based on existing cryptocurrencies Luckycoin and Litecoin which use scrypt technology in their proof-of-work algorithm. The use of  scrypt  means that miners cannot use  SHA-256 bitcoin mining equipment, and instead must use dedicated  FPGA and ASIC devices for mining which are known to be more complex to produce.

On December 19, 2013, Dogecoin jumped nearly 300 percent in value in 72 hours, rising from US$0.00026 to $0.00095, with a volume of billions of Dogecoins per day. This growth occurred during a time when bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies were reeling from China's decision to forbid Chinese banks from investing into the bitcoin economy. Three days later, Dogecoin experienced its first major crash by dropping by 80% due to this event and to large mining pools exploiting the small amount of computing power required at the time to mine Dogecoin.

On December 25, 2013, the first major theft of Dogecoin occurred when millions of coins were stolen during a hack on the online  cryptocurrency wallet  platform Dogewallet. The hacker gained access to the platform's filesystem and modified its send/receive page to send any and all coins to a static address.This hacking incident spiked tweets about Dogecoin, making it the most mentioned altcoin on Twitter at the time, although it was in reference to a negative event. To help those who lost funds on Dogewallet after its breach, the Dogecoin community started an initiative named "SaveDogemas" to help donate coins to those who had them stolen. Approximately one month later, enough money was donated to cover all of the coins that were stolen.

In January 2014, the trading volume of Dogecoin briefly surpassed that of Bitcoin and all other crypto-currencies combined. However, its market capitalization remained substantially behind that of Bitcoin. Initially, Dogecoin featured a randomized reward that is received for each mining block. However, in March 2014, this behaviour was later updated to a static block reward.

In April 2015, Jackson Palmer announced plans to take an "extended leave of absence" from the cryptocurrency community.

During 2017 to early 2018  cryptocurrency bubble , Dogecoin briefly reached a peak of $0.017/coin on January 7, 2018, putting its total market capitalization near USD 2 billion.

In July 2020, the price of Dogecoin spiked following a  Tik Tok trend aiming to get the coin's price to $1.

In January 2021, Dogecoin went up over 800% in 24 hours, attaining a price of $0.07, as a result of attention from  Reddit users, partially encouraged by  Elon Musk and the  Gamestop short squeeze .  In February 2021, Dogecoin hit a new high price of $0.08 following Twitter encouragement from Musk, Snoop dogg  and Gene Simmsons .  In March 2021,  Dallas Mavericks  owner Mark Cuban  announced his  NBA team would allow purchasing tickets and products with Dogecoin; within two days, Cuban had declared his franchise had become the top Dogecoin merchant, having carried out 20,000 transactions.

In April 2021, Dogecoin and other cryptocurrencies surged, stimulated in part by the direct listing  for cryptocurrency exchange  coinbase on April 14, although that platform did not provide trading of Dogecoin.  Its price first reached $0.10 on April 14, before hitting a new high of $0.45 on April 16 (up 400% that week ), with a volume of nearly $70 billion traded in the preceding 24 hours.  At the time, Dogecoin's market capitalization approached $50 billion, making it the fifth-highest-valued cryptocurrency; its value had increased more than 7,000% year-to-date. Interest in Dogecoin contributed to an outage in electronic trading platform Robinhood's cryptocurrency system on April 15, caused by "unprecedented demand", and prompted concerns from experts of a nearing speculative bubble  in the cryptocurrency market.

On May 4, 2021, the value of Dogecoin first surpassed the symbolic hurdle of $0.50, a greater than 20,000% increase in one year.

On May 8, 2021, despite, or perhaps because of expectations of a surge in interest in Dogecoin resulting from Elon musk's appearance on Saturday night live  , Dogecoin dropped 34% from $0.711 at the opening of the show to below $0.470 45 minutes later. By the following morning Dogecoin hit a swing low of $0.401, a cumulative drop of 43.6% and lost value of $35 billion.

On May 9, 2021,  SpaceX announced a rideshare mission to the Moon completely funded by Dogecoin, thus becoming the first space mission funded by a cryptocurrency.  Elon Musk  confirmed this news via Twitter . DOGE-1 will be a minor 40kg rideshare payload on  intuitive Machines'IM-1 mission in Q1 2022.

Dogecoin started with a supply limit of 100 billion coins, which would have been far more coins than the top digital currencies were then allowing. By mid-2015 the 100 billionth Dogecoin had been mined with an additional 5 billion coins put into circulation every year thereafter. Although there is no theoretical supply limit, at this rate, the number of Dogecoins put into circulation will only double in 20 years (the next doubling will occur in the year 2075). There is no implemented hard cap on the total supply of Dogecoins. Nonetheless, in February 2014, Dogecoin founder Jackson Palmer announced that the limit would be removed in an effort to create a consistent reduction of its inflation rate over time. In other words, the inflation rate improves over time starting at 5% in 2015 to less than 4% by 2019, 3% by 2027, and 2% by 2035.

Elon Musk and Dogecoin 

Elon Musk  frequently uses his  Twitter  platform to express his views on Dogecoin, which has led some to claim that his actions amount to market manipulation  because the price of Dogecoin frequently experiences price movements shortly after Dogecoin-related tweets released by Elon Musk . Some examples are given below.

As reported by  CNBC ,  the price of Dogecoin rose by 11% on the 20th of May 2021 shortly after Musk tweeted a Doge-related meme .

As reported by  Newsweek  on the 24th of May 2021, the price of Dogecoin was up 10% in the hours after Musk tweeted a  reddit link for users to submit proposals to improve the cryptocurrency. However, as outlined by Newsweek , it is not clear if the tweet was responsible for the spike.