This Saturday, a bunch of misfits, rebels, and weirdos will be gathering in San Francisco to celebrate Dogecoin turning a year old. Yes — we’ll be there.

Shit. We’re growing up so fast.

When I first discovered Dogecoin during the Great Winter Radeon Shortage of 2013, I thought it was the best parody of a cryptocurrency I’d ever seen. I mined a few million, posted about it on Facebook, sent a bunch to my friends, and eventually set up this thing called “dogetipbot” on Reddit.

The rest, as they say… is history.

A couple of nerds, obviously.

Want to know the strangest part of this story? dogetipbot has processed over 735,000 completed (accepted) tips, totalling $253,000+ USD (over 500 million Dogecoins), and we’re not even a year old yet. We’ve signed up 75,000 users and we’ve barely launched outside of Reddit. Our mean transaction size continues to remain around $0.03 USD, or roughly 60 Dogecoins (averaged).

We continue to defy conventional logic as far as microtransactions are concerned, and we absolutely love it. Hell, we even raised $445k in a seed round to keep this train moving well on into 2015.

Here’s the even stranger thing: we’ve never let you tip in dollar amounts, period. All this has been done with Dogecoin values.

3 months after we launched, our users managed to tip more on Reddit with Dogecoin than Bitcointip users did over a year. That was just absurd.

dogetipbot : often imitated, never duplicated

I’ve been approached many times over the last year about launching a tipbot for altcoins (Bitcoin, Litecoin, DarkCoin, FlavourOfTheMonthCoin) I’ve declined all offers — our core bot is open source and can easily scale up to 30k+ users.

We’re not interested in doing other cryptos, though. Dogecoin is a unique thing, and I don’t think it’s success and awesomeness could ever be replicated by swapping in a new coin. Especially when compared to this:

Sure, Bitcoin has been around for 6 years, has a high degree of liquidity, and a metric fuckton of VC backing. However, the success of dogetipbot has always been because of our amazing users and our culture.

/r/dogecoin is often described as “the friendliest place on the Internet” (and for a good reason). We really are a silly bunch. We have a very serious agenda (hint: it’s “Be excellent to each other…”). We’re more likely to post silly images on the Internet than discuss the finer points of International Finance and remittance markets.

We love fundraising and fun equally. Secret Shibes are in almost every major Technology company (and even a few Fortune 500s too). 😉 We’re everywhere, and we’re not going away anytime soon.

Is there room for other players in this space? Absolutely. Will they experience the awesome growth, fun, and community that dogetipbot/Dogecoin has had? Probably not.

With Dogecoin — (I can’t believe I’m saying this) — the size of the tip has never mattered. For every 50000 Dogecoin tip that goes unclaimed there’s thousands of 100 Dogecoin tips accepted. It’s like getting an invitation to an amazing party, where most everyone you meet turns out to be really fun and interesting people.

2014 has been a crazy year for Dogecoin, but dogetipbot and Wow Such Business is just getting started. 2015 is definitely going to be our most fun year yet. We’re extremely excited to make announcements as soon as our new products are done. 🙂

Whether you view Dogecoin as the gateway crypto or just a fun way to throw change at people on the Internet, we’re wholeheartedly committed to this venture.

With that said, I’ll repeat one of my favourite phrases ever: Our users are fucking awesome.

To the moon!

–mohland