It was originally created as a joke, but within a couple of months, the altcoin gained a market capitalization of $60 million. The coin is easy to mine and has no supply limits, which is why there are billions of Dogecoins circulating around the world. Nowadays, this altcoin is often used to get tips for interesting content on the Internet.
Early history
The coin was designed by Portland programmer Billy Markus in 2013. Adobe Systems employee Jackson Palmer helped Marcus realize his vision of a funny cryptocurrency that would not evoke associations with the criminal reputation of the cryptocurrency world.
The developers have created a website that uses the comic sans font and an image of a Shiba Innu dog, both elements of the popular Doge meme. The original coin created by Markus was very similar to Luck coin, a lite coin-based cryptocurrency, but later it went through some upgrades. All these coins use encryption technology which made it easy to mine these coins in the early years.
Dogecoin became available to the general public in December 2013. Two weeks later, the price rose by 300% and fell again after a Dogecoin wallet was hacked, resulting in the theft of millions of Dogecoins (all coins were compensated by the Dogecoin community through donations a month later). Soon, DOGE began to be listed on many exchanges (the coin is currently available on dozens of crypto exchanges.
including giants such as Kraken, Finance, Oakes and Hudoba). In 2014, the Dogecoin community encouraged people to donate $50,000 in DOGE to the Jamaican bobsleigh team so they can come to Sochi to compete in the Winter Olympics. The action turned out to be successful. Shortly thereafter, Eric Nakagawa in collaboration with charity: Water raised $30,000 in DOGE to fund a well in Kenya.
That same year, the Dogecoin community successfully raised the $55,000 in DOGE needed to sponsor NASCAR driver Josh Wise, who competed in a number of Dogecoin and Reddit tagged car races. In 2015, Jackson Palmer left the project, but the coin is still popular and actively used. Since Palmer’s departure, the coin has not seen any noticeable improvements, and it has neither a technical document nor a roadmap. Dogecoin proved successful and entered the top 50 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.
Use cases
There are several ways to use Dogecoin as a currency. On Reddit, Twitter, and Imdur, DOGE is used to inform content creators. Money can be sent using a bot developed by enthusiasts from the Dogecoin community. Charity events with the participation of DOGE are no longer held as often as before. However, if it was possible to raise thousands of dollars worth of Dogecoins in the past, we believe it could happen again at any time.
In the late 2010s, the Dogecoin Reddit community ran a series of charity events for the homeless, raising funds for DOGE. There have been initiatives such as DogePizzaForHomeless and Socksforhomeless that have been successfully implemented.
Since the community is the driving force behind Dogecoin’s infrastructure, it’s no surprise that these individuals, and not the development team, are responsible for creating tip bots and other applications aimed at making DOGE easier to use. One of the best examples is Doge Pal, a payment network for DOGE transactions where people can send DOGE coins to each other using email addresses.
Moreover, a number of merchants accept DOGE as a means of payment. This coin has been used by individuals to buy everything from internet domains to real estate. Despite being a fairly average coin in terms of technology, the value of the assets is maintained thanks to the efforts of its community. The strength of the people using this coin drives the price forward and keeps this asset in the spotlight for years. At one point, Elon Musk called Dogecoin his favorite cryptocurrency.
Features of Dogecoin
The network is based on the Proof-of-Work consensus protocol, which makes this coin available for mining. Dogecoin is an inflationary currency as it has no supply cap and new coins will be mined over and over again increasing the total amount of DOGE circulating. The blocking time is 1 minute. Transactions in DOGE are quite cheap. It is capable of 30 transactions per second (the Bitcoin network only performs about 7 transactions per second).
The consensus algorithm used by Dogecoin is different from the usual proof of work. This is called Auxiliary Proof of Work. Due to this, DOGE coins can be combined with Lite coin. This means that DOGE can be mined at the same time as Lite coin without any additional work. On the one hand, this feature helps Dogecoin avoid 51% attacks, on the other hand.
it keeps Dogecoin relevant, as many people mine the popular Lite coin currency, earning some DOGE as a bonus that can be used for various purposes. Since 2018, the block reward has been 10,000 Dodi. This altcoin is supported by several multi-currency wallets, including the popular platforms Atomic Wallet, Exodus, Freeballed, and more. Moreover, DOGE can be stored in a Doge chain wallet.
