Bitcoiners-the nebulous pot of investors, miners, tech enthusiasts and libertarians - are a very serious group of people. Dogecoiners, not so much. Named for a mispronunciation of the world "dog," dogecoin is the brain child of Jackson Palmer, a marketing professional at Adobe, who claimed that he was going to invest in dogecoin after seeing a series of increasingly ridiculous alt-currency names.

Palmer bought the domain name, slapped a picture of a dog on the virtual coin and with the help of Billy Markus, a programmer who had been developing a spinoff of an altcoin-launched dogecoin about a week after first tweeting about it.

“We thought ‘Yeah, we’ll release it and like most funny things online, people will use it for three days and then they’ll give it up and that’s it,’” said Palmer in an interview with Gigaom. We put it up on Dogecoin.com and the thing just exploded. I wasn’t even mining it at the time.”

Individual doge coins are very low value, a fraction of a sent, but the transactions are becoming increasingly numerous, and have even surpassed bitcoin for isolated stretches of time. They are also becoming more visible and are now sponsoring a NASCAR driver.

Though they make use of the same technology that powers bitcoin, dogecoin takes itself a good deal less seriously, as the video below demonstrates.

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