We are moving into an era where the currency we use be a conscious, active, even activist decision, a value statement based on who we are and what we need, argues Carl Miller, Research Director at the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at think tank Demos. Follow him on Twitter at @carljackmiller

Doge is a cherubic Shiba Inu dog owned by one Mrs Atsuko Sato, a kindergarten teacher in Japan. He is the latest power-meme forged on the image boards of 4chan that is now ploughing through social media. If you haven't met doge yet, check him out: there is something mysteriously funny about his expression and broken-English captions that you can't quite put your finger on.

What does doge have in common with monarchs and states, from the ancient Babylonian King Hammurabi, to King Henry I, to the European Union? They have all created their own currencies. There are $8,618,242 worth of dogecoins in existence, a hundred thousand dollars worth more than when I started writing this article a few hours ago. More than $300,000 of doges were traded in the last day.


What is happening here comes back to bitcoin. Bitcoin broke through in two important ways. The first was obviously its visibility and use. It was the first cryptocurrency to emerge from the darker, tech-savvy communities of the internet to become a realistic proposition for offline and mainstream life -- to get its own ATMs and the beginnings of a widespread acceptance, and to become seriously valuable in the process. But this was only made possible because bitcoin was also a technological breakthrough: earlier digital currencies had struggled and failed on a number of counts where bitcoin succeeded.

A particularly vexed question, double spend -- where people could spend the same digital coin more than once in a short space of time -- had plagued earlier versions.

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This second breakthrough has opened an extremely important door.

For around the money in your wallet, a programmer can piggyback on the bitcoin code, customise it, and within a day give you your own currency. There are around 70 cryptocurrencies currently being traded in reasonable quantities. At the moment, most have tinkered around with bitcoin to offer some kind of additional edge. Litecoins offer faster transactions. Worldcoins, designed with a small total cap, promise to appreciate over time. Anoncoin claims to be more anonymous (obviously) and Stablecoin to have "military-grade" encryption.


Yet a second kind of cryptocurrency is appearing for another reason. Devcoins are used by open-source developers. Peercoin are used by those who desire, in their eyes, a more equitable way of sharing out the currency in the first place (bitcoin is notoriously unequal, a few big miners and early adopters hold the majority of bitcoin wealth). Coinye Wests will be for gigs and music. Sexcoins are self-explanatory. These new cryptocurrencies are being used as a way of affiliating with a group, community, interest or set of principles. Using dogecoins, which sport no particular advantage over bitcoins at all, is most directly a cultural rather than a financial decision.

We are moving into an era where the currency we use be a conscious, active, even activist decision, a value statement based on who we are and what we need. Imagine: eco-cafes will trade in currencies where a tiny percentage of each transaction goes to a good cause. You will pay your child pocket money in a currency they can only use on certain, child-proofed things. We might pay our officials allowances in a completely non-anonymous currency so we can track everything they spend. Niche groups and communities, from survivalists in Utah and comic book fans in New York to terrorist cells, will, with just a little bit of technological know-how, be able to create and finesse a currency that works specifically for them.

I confidently predict that the number of cryptocurrencies that are regularly traded and used will radically grow. Their exchange with each other is also likely to grow more intensive and seamless.

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We might end up habitually using dozens of currencies without noticing, as super-fast transactions allow us to move our money into the currency we need at that time. You might quickly exchange the sexcoins you have left over from last night into bitcoins to pay your freelance designer, devcoins to make a contribution to her open-source project, and a childcoin so your kid can browse amazon whilst they wait.

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Cryptocurrencies are now part of our cultural and technological development. Their attributes and capabilities will constantly change. At a barest minimum, the security conscious will lump on more and more ways of keeping them secure against theft. The privacy conscious likewise will do so against detection.

There is then nothing funny about dogecoins. One of the fundamental problems our governments are facing today is that technological development is simply outpacing law and regulation.


This problem is everywhere in 21st century policy-making. What technology exists, how we understand and use it, is whipping by faster and faster, whilst law-making, taking place in 19th century institutions, is slow. The revelations of Edward Snowden is a strong reminder of what happens when 21st century technology meets decade-old law and 19th-century political institutions. The results are not often pretty.

That smiling Shiba Inu dog is the face of a new kind of highly personalised financial order that we do not know how to react to.

We are moving towards a complex profusion of different financial regimes that are all slightly different. They all may need slightly different responses from government: different ways of protecting users, of regulating the currency and of drawing tax. As doge himself would say: "such innovashun", "much mystery".