

This is a pizza, although not one bought with Dogecoin. (via rob_rob2001

Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency based on a beloved Shiba Inu meme to which this reporter bears a striking resemblance, may be mostly a joke. But it's a joke you can use to buy pizza.

Earlier this week, entrepreneur Eric Nakagawa shared pictures of his recent Dogecoin bounty: Pizza and beer "bought" with 10,000 Dogcecoin. Nakagawa says he used the service @tipdoge, which lets users initiate a transaction via Twitter to give the Hawaii-based JJ Dolan's Pizza the equivalent of roughly $16 at current exchange rates.

Nakagawa isn't the first person to find a way to turn Dogecoin into cheese-topped sustenance. Last month, a redditor showed off a Dominos pizza he had "bought" with 5,000 Dogecoin, but explained in the comments that he had convinced the delivery person to pay for the pizza out of his own wallet in exchange for the cryptocurrency. The JJ Dolan's story is closer to directly purchasing through a vendor, but doesn't represent a scalable way for a retail outlet to deal in Dogecoin.

However, these sorts of third-party transactions still may signify a trend toward more general acceptance of the cryptocurrency. And pizza is a traditional starting point: The first real-world bitcoin transaction in 2010 is widely reported to have been when a Florida programmer sent an individual in the U.K. 10,000 bitcoins to spend about $25 ordering the programmer Papa John's online.

Bitcoin has grown by leaps and bounds since then and there are now a fair number of places that accept it, from car dealerships to online florists. But as Forbes' Kashmir Hill discovered last year, it's still hard if not impossible for most to live on Bitcoin alone.