Dogecoin

As strange as this may sound, this currency is based in internet meme culture. Around 2013 a meme depicting a Shiba Inu popped into popular culture and inspired Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer to create the ‘Dogecoin’. Initially, Markus and Palmer meant the coin as kind of satire, both on the new emerging cryptocurrency landscape and internets effect on popular culture. It gained lots of hype very quickly, and like most memes, this happens through various social media platforms and imageboards. The Dogecoin quickly became used for tipping people who created content on these sites, which just helped increase the coins popularity. Because of the new tipping systems Dogecoin was actually the most trade coin by volume, even surpassing bitcoin. This was only for a brief time in early 2014, but is worth a mention.

What is Dogecoin?

A Dogecoin is, just like ether and bitcoin, a blockchain based currency. The blockchain helps keeping everything aligned and running forward. When a transaction is made it is recorded in a public ledger that is for everyone the see, this goes for all transactions. You might think that that would be a possible breech of privacy, but no names are attached to the recorded transaction and is therefore kept only between the involved, securing total anonymity. The transparency has been implemented to ensure the public can inspect that there is no creator making an infinite supply. This is a big difference to conventional currency, which has a handful of banks being able to print as much paper money they want, without public oversight. The blockchain ensures this be counting the amount of coins being moved around and making sure it matches with the total amount mined.

Dogecoin is what you call a deflationary currency, which means there are a theoretically unlimited amount of Dogecoins up for mining. The way to mine Dogecoin are built on the Scrypt-based proof-of-work algorithm made for another crypto currency called litcoin. This is very easy to do and do not require as much power as for example bitcoin mining. In fact a hard fork sprung from Dogecoin when it merged with Litcoin late in 2014. In more recent news another hard fork is just on the way, with a merge of Ethereum and Dogecoin called ‘Dogethereum’

Where do you get Dogecoins?

If you want to acquire yourself some Dogecoins, the first thing you have to do is downloading a crypto currency wallet. After opening a account you should be able the buy Dogecoins through an exchange and store them in the wallet of your choice. As always look carefully into which exchange you choose, are they licensed? Are there exchange rates competitive? And do they make interaction easy for you? These are all thing to keep in mind when looking for an exchange.

Another way to get your hands on some Dogecoins through mining them yourself, this is easy and inexpensive and just require you to own a computer with an internet connection. Such ease, much coin, wow.