Dogecoin (DOGE) Live Price

What Is Dogecoin?

Dogecoin is a peer-to-peer, open-source cryptocurrency, similar to a Bitcoin altcoin, that offers its users a completely unknown, decentralized, and secure environment free of any third-party interference in transactions.

Dogecoin was created as a joke in late 2013 by software developers Billy Marcus and Jackson Palmer, who were Reddit friends that had never met in person.

They combined two popular themes in their online community at the time: the ascendant cryptocurrency Bitcoin and a meme depicting a Shiba Inu and a misspelled version of the word "dog."

Unlike Bitcoin, which was designed to be scarce, Dogecoin is designed to be abundant with 10,000 new coins being mined every minute and no cap on supply.

For the majority of its existence, Dogecoin was regarded as an amusing "meme coin" beloved by its community but with little monetary value. That changed in 2021: as of April, Dogecoin was one of the top ten cryptocurrencies by market cap, with a total value of more than $50 billion, despite the fact that each individual coin is worth pennies.

It has approximately 130 billion DOGE in circulation, with miners producing 10,000 more every minute. (There are approximately 19 million bitcoins, with only 12.5 BTC mined every ten minutes). 

How Do You Mine Dogecoin?

Dogecoin, like other cryptocurrencies, is "mined" by the currency's decentralized network of computers. As a reward for processing transactions, networked computers perform complex mathematical calculations that effectively unlock coins or fractions of coins.

As of September 2022, there were approximately 132.7 billion Dogecoin in circulation, though new coins are created literally every minute. In addition, unlike Bitcoin, which has a hard limit on total issuance, Dogecoin has no limit on the number of coins that can be mined. A seemingly infinite number of coins can be created. The annual issuance of new coins, however, is limited to 5 billion and can continue indefinitely.

Dogecoin's proof-of-work protocol differs from Bitcoin's in several ways, one of which is the use of Scrypt technology. The altcoin also has a 1 minute block time and an uncapped total supply, which means that there is no limit to the number of Dogecoin that can be mined. You can mine Dogecoin either alone or as part of a mining pool.

What Can Dogecoin Be Used For?

Dogecoin is now used for transactions by many businesses and organizations, including restaurants, groceries, web hosting, product retailers, E-booksellers, and travel services.

These are a few examples of businesses from various industries that use Dogecoin.

Among the top companies that use Dogecoin are Twitch, GameStop, Dallas Maverick, Playhub Casino, Prodigy, and FlokiNET Etc.

Dogecoin, like other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, can be used to transfer money between people, either as payment for goods or services or simply as cash. Users can also transact semi-anonymously, even if a record is publicly available on the blockchain and they can do it without using a traditional intermediary like a bank.

How Can You Buy Dogecoin?

You can purchase Dogecoin from a variety of websites, and your choice may be influenced by your intended use.

If you want to buy Dogecoin just to speculate, you can use an online brokerage like Robinhood, which allows cryptocurrency trading but many other brokers do not support crypto trading at all. Any stake you have in the coin will be held by the broker.

If you want to buy Dogecoin to trade or use it, you can do so through most of the trusted centralized exchanges which includes Coinbase or Binance Etc.

Elon Musk and Dogecoin

Dogecoin has one of the most active and dedicated communities available. As a result, it has received publicity from public figures who have either purchased the cryptocurrency themselves or simply endorsed it via social media channels such as Twitter. These waves of publicity have been a driving force behind Dogecoin's growth, as its price is subject to fluctuations whenever it is featured on social media.

Following that, Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and the most prominent Dogecoin supporter, began frequently tweeting about a fake "Doge" magazine cover, causing the price of this meme cryptocurrency to rise. Following that, other celebrities also began tweeting and promoting Dogecoin on social media.

Elon Musk tweeted "Doge barking at the moon" in April 2020, causing Dogecoin's value to increase by over 600%. As a result of these actions, Dogecoin is currently worth $41 billion.

How Dogecoin Works?

Dogecoin's blockchain employs a proof-of-work consensus mechanism, which is the same system used by Bitcoin to reach an agreement among network participants on the data to be added to the blockchain.

The mining code for Dogecoin was initially copied from another cryptocurrency project called LuckyCoin. LuckyCoin, a fork of Litecoin, which is a fork of Bitcoin, had a completely random block reward schedule in which miners could receive thousands of free coins for creating new blocks.

Dogecoin Foundation and Board of Advisors

The Dogecoin Foundation is a non-profit organization which was founded in 2014 to provide:

The Foundation has been re-energized by members of the original core team, as well as new faces and seasoned advisors, and is ready to grow Dogecoin for the next decade.

The group's advisors include Dogecoin founder Billy Markus, the project's core developer Max Keller, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, and Elon Musk, as represented by the Musk family office's head, Jared Birchall.

Risks of Owning Dogecoin

Dogecoin, like most cryptocurrencies (excluding stablecoins), is not backed by any assets or cash flow. That is, its price is solely determined by what other people are willing to pay for it. In contrast, the performance of the underlying business drives long-term price appreciation in a stock. The rise of Dogecoin is based on speculators becoming even more optimistic, or what is known as the "greater fool theory of investing."

For these reasons, investment legends like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway avoid cryptocurrencies and advise investors to do the same.

None of this means you can't make money trading Dogecoin; rather, it's unlikely to have long-term value.

Key Events and Management

Palmer and Markus created Dogecoin in 2013. Palmer stated in a 2019 interview that the inspiration for the project came from two internet tabs he had open on his computer at the time, one with a viral internet meme of a Japanese Shiba Inu "doge" and the other with a list of recently added cryptocurrency projects.

DogeTipBot, a third-party tipping service that interfaced with Reddit and allowed users to send dogecoin microtransactions to each other in exchange for posting favorable content, was created in 2014.

With over 70,000 sign-ups by August 2014, DogeTipBot had become the crypto industry's leading tipping service. It was operational for three years before being discontinued.

The project was left in the hands of volunteer developers from the dogecoin community, who update the underlying code irregularly.

The price of doge increased 142% and then increased 200% after Musk joined the fray by tweeting a satirical image of "Dogue" magazine to his 54 million Twitter followers. Since then, Musk, the self-proclaimed "Dogefather," has been responsible for several spikes in doge prices by sharing references and memes about the dog-themed cryptocurrency on his social media feed.