The meme-based ‘joke’ currency surpassed Bitcoin this week. What's the deal?

Text Zing Tsjeng

Now that Kanye West has threatened to sue the makers of CoinyeCoin, it's time for another altcoin's moment in the sun. Enter Dogecoin, the cutest cryptocurrency on the internet. Initially dismissed as a novelty (much premature), it now sees double the amount of transactions as Bitcoin and has already trumped every other digital currency on the market. So how did a joke currency become one of the fastest growing altcoins on the web? In late November, Dogecoin co-founder Jackson Palmer was tickled by the flurry of cryptocurrencies emerging on the market and registered the domain Dogecoin.com to spoof the altcoin boom. He slapped on a simple logo, pleased with his take on the doge meme that had been doing the rounds on the internet. “At that point, it was nothing more than a hilarious idea,” he says. “But by the time I’d woken up the following morning, Billy [Markus, a former IBM engineer] had tweeted me a working QT Wallet for Dogecoin. The rest is history.”

Creating a QT Wallet meant that Dogecoin could function as a working digital currency, in the same way that Bitcoin does. But the first sign that Dogecoin was more than just a passing fad was a few weeks later, when it jumped more than 300 percent in value in a day – the greatest increase of any cryptocurrency over 24 hours. A Dogecoin micro-economy has even sprouted up around the currency. On sites like shibemart.com and the subreddit /r/dogeservice, you can use Dogecoins to pay for Latin translation, Photoshop services, or even getting your plumbing fixed (currently only available in Vancouver). But the biggest use of Dogecoin is also what distinguishes the altcoin from its counterparts: tipping. Made a witty comment on a subreddit? You could get tipped Dogecoin. Created a cute macro? Have a few Dogecoins. As Dogecoin investor Ben Doernberg explains, people on social networks like Reddit, Twitter or Imgur regularly produce great ideas, images or content. You could have a million followers, get a thousand upvotes or reblogs, he says, but there’s no way to capitalise on that in real monetary terms.

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