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A Cryptocurrency Based On a Dog Meme Is Now Worth Over $1 Billion (vice.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the what's-the-world-coming-to dept.

Earlier today, the market capitlization of dogecoin, a cryptocurrency based on a meme about a Shiba Inu dog, passed the $1 billion mark for the first time. VICE News reports: Dogecoin was created back in the early days of the cryptocurrency craze. Launched in December 2013 as somewhat of a joke, the meme-inspired coin was dubbed "the internet currency" and designed to promote a sense of community and generosity rather than simply looking to make money. It gained fame during 2014 when it was used to send the Jamaican bobsled team to the Winter Olympics in Sochi and it even sponsored a Nascar team. The currency has been in relative stasis since, and despite no software updates being released in over two years, the cryptocurrency has risen more than 400 percent in the last month -- though one dogecoin is still worth just over 1 cent.

Even Jackson Palmer, one of the founders of the coin, expressed concern about the hyperinflation of dogecoin. "It says a lot about the state of the cryptocurrency space in general that a currency with a dog on it which hasn't released a software update in over 2 years has a $1 billion+ market cap," Jackson told Coindesk.

3 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. Commodity "currency" makes no sense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It only works because people have convinced enough other people that it makes sense to invest in it. When that stops being the case it's gone overnight.

    The value is completely artificial from start to finish, there's nothing backing it, there's no massive value behind it to stabilize a run. But it exists, and people love new cons.

    1. Re:Commodity "currency" makes no sense by CrankyOldEngineer · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No, NicknameUnavailable. Cryptocurrencies are not commodities. Commodities are physical goods or services that are largely fungible. Like wheat, copper, or oil. Cryptocurrencies are designed to be media of exchange. Their value is only in facilitating trade. (And not even very good at that, in my opinion.) They are not investment vehicles (despite what the US Treasury Dept says) and certainly not goods in the economic sense (ie, they have no instrinsic value).

      --
      COE
  2. NetJ by gbjbaanb · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I will just remind our younger readers of the dotcom boom, where tech stocks were seen as the new big thing and pumped up a bubble that eventually crashed. You can tell the top of this by looking at a tech company that was registered on the NASDAQ called NETJ.COM,

    This had all the right words in the name, "net", "J" (for Java, hot at the time) and ".com" but its description of what the company did was:

    The company is not currently engaged in any substantial activity and has no plans to engage in such activities in the foreseeable future

    and this raised several $110 million in IPO funding from ordinary investors when it floated.

    So a dog coin cryptocurrency "worth" $1bn... just same shit, different day.