Buy Dogecoin (DOGE)

Dogecoin is a very well-known coin because many people find it cute, especially because of the picture that comes with it. Dogecoin actually started as a big joke, as a reaction to the wild days of cryptocurrency in 2013. They wanted to ridicule speculation in crypto, but became hugely popular despite everything. Consequently, they demonstrated that people were investing in crypto without doing any research. The early adopters of Dogecoin must have missed little sleep over it, given the huge rise in value of this coin. It is a so-called meme coin, which means as much as a coin that has a funny picture as its symbol. In the case of Dogecoin, that's a Shiba Inu dog, a Japanese breed, looking at you sideways. A meme coin doesn't actually have a utility function. It is just a cute picture with a cryptocurrency with no use value for developers. The ticker symbol is DOGE.

Dogecoin is an open-source peer to peer digital currency. Their motto is "Do Only Good Everyday." Dogecoin is built as a fork on Luckycoin, which in turn is based on Litecoin blockchain technology. Dogecoin wants to be seen as the friendly community, which they have proven over time, as you can read in the remainder of this story. Over time, this coin has achieved cult status.

December 6, 2013, Dogecoin was introduced as a joke to create a payment system that would ridicule wild speculation in cryptocurrency. The designers of this coin were IBM software engineer Billy Markus (sometimes jokingly called Shibetoshi Nakamoto after his Twitter account, after Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin) and Adobe software engineer Jackson Palmer. They are from America and Australia. They wanted to create a peer to peer coin that had a wider reach than Bitcoin. The joke was soon on them, as within a month the website Dogecoin.com already received more than a million visitors.

December 19, 2013, the coin soared 300% to nearly 1/10th of a dollar cent, followed by an 80% crash in response to China's decision to ban banks from investing in the Bitcoin economy. December 25, 2013 followed already the first hack, in which large amounts of DOGE were captured. The topic "hack of Dogecoin" was trending on Twitter and the Dogecoin community started the Twitter thread "SaveDogemas" to donate coins to those who had been stolen. Not much later, enough had been raised and everyone had their money back. In January 2014, Dogecoin traded more in volume than all other coins, including Bitcoin, combined! In this year, the random reward was also replaced by a fixed one for mining a new block. In 2014, Jamaica's poor bobsled team (!) did not have enough money to leave for Sochi. Consequently, they had by no means counted on placing. The Dogecoin community liked it so much that they placed, they started a campaign to get this team to Sochi. No sooner said than done, and the boys from Jamaica were able to pack their bags anyway with a $50,000 budget. March 22, 2014 was World Water Day. The Dogecoin community then raised $30,000 to drill wells in the Tana Valley in Kenya. This project is ongoing and more often new wells are being drilled in Africa through their Dogecoin Foundation. In the same month, Dogecoin fanatics (nickname: Shibes) sponsored a NASCAR racer named Josh White. All over the car was the text Dogecoin and that dog's logo. The whole prank cost only $55,000.

In 2015, there followed a re-fork on top of Bitcoin, building Litecoin technology on top of Bitcoin, using the advantages of both blockchains while still building out their own blockchain with advantages these networks did not have, such as speed, usability and low transaction costs. During the crazy days of late 2017 - early 2018, Dogecoin was worth close to 2 cents, for a while, then it also collapsed, just like the rest of the coins.

Since the year 2020, Dogecoin has had competition from another little dog. Well, another little dog, it is also Shiba Inu, but with the same name for the coin. Since then, you can see that there is a competition going on: who has the cutest dog? So far Dogecoin almost always wins, but occasionally Shiba Inu stood above them. To be continued!

May 8, 2021, Dogecoin was worth the most ever, 60 cents. There had been a campaign to get Dogecoin to $1 and they almost succeeded. When Elon Musk, a great proponent of Dogecoin, talked about Dogecoin on the show "Saturday Night Live," everyone expected that the coin, then at 71 cents, would have touched the dollar after the show. The opposite happened. DOGE dropped to 47 cents during the beginning of the show and to 40 cents after. It's quite a fun clip on Youtube, in which Musk is asked several times what Dogecoin really is. After each answer, they ask him again, "But what exactly is Dogecoin?" At one point, the presenter asks him, "So, it's a hustle?" And Musk says with a wink, "Yeah, kinda." On May 9, 2021, SpaceX, Elon Musk's space toy, announced a lunar mission funded entirely by Dogecoins, which of course was a symbolic nod to send Dogecoin to the moon (moons).

A more frequent FUD is that virtually all Dogecoin is owned by a few whales, but it turns out that these "whales" are exchanges, which must have lots of Doge in cold storage as collateral for their clients' funds.