Dogecoin – Speculation/gambling in the “zero-sum game”

Added to the Museum of Data by Jing Hu on Wednesday, December 15, 2021. Museum of Data Collection ID: 984.

Public description: 1. What it is - From Wikipedia Symbol Ð Code DOGE Originally formed as a "joke", Dogecoin was created by IBM software engineer Billy Markus and Adobe software engineer Jackson Palmer. They wanted to create a peer-to-peer digital currency that could reach a broader demographic than Bitcoin. In addition, they wanted to distance it from the controversial history of other coins. Unlike bitcoin, the total amount of Dogecoin is unlimited. Markus set the upper limit of Dogecoin circulation to 100 billion from the beginning, and 5 billion new coins can be generated every year. Due to its large number, low barrier to entry, and its own entertainment and bantering meaning, Dogecoin has gained an astonishing amount of attention in the online community Reddit in a short period of time. Dogecoin was officially launched on December 6, 2013, and within the first 30 days, there were over a million visitors to Dogecoin.com. "It's actually quite simple, basically it's a search and replace job. I copied a lot of Bitcoin code and then replaced 'Bitcoin' with 'Dogecoin'." Markus once reviewed the development of Dogecoin in an interview. Markus even nicknamed himself "Shibetoshi Nakamoto" to mock the founder of Bitcoin "Satoshi Nakamoto". 2. The history of Dogecoin On December 19, 2013, Dogecoin jumped nearly 300% in value in 72 hours, rising from US$0.00026 to $0.00095, with a volume of billions of Dogecoins per day. This growth occurred during a time when bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies were reeling from China's decision to forbid Chinese banks from investing into the bitcoin economy. Three days later, Dogecoin experienced its first major crash by dropping by 80% due to this event and to large mining pools exploiting the small amount of computing power required at the time to mine Dogecoin. On December 25, 2013, the first major theft of Dogecoin occurred when millions of coins were stolen during a hack on the online cryptocurrency wallet platform Dogewallet. The hacker gained access to the platform's filesystem and modified its send/receive page to send any and all coins to a static address. This hacking incident spiked tweets about Dogecoin, making it the most mentioned altcoin on Twitter at the time, although it was in reference to a negative event. To help those who lost funds on Dogewallet after its breach, the Dogecoin community started an initiative named "SaveDogemas" to help donate coins to those who had them stolen. Approximately one month later, enough money was donated to cover all of the coins that were stolen. In January 2014, the trading volume of Dogecoin briefly surpassed that of Bitcoin and all other crypto-currencies combined. However, its market capitalization remained substantially behind that of Bitcoin. Initially, Dogecoin featured a randomized reward that is received for each mining block. However, in March 2014, this behaviour was later updated to a static block reward. During 2017 to early 2018 cryptocurrency bubble, Dogecoin briefly reached a peak of $0.017/coin on January 7, 2018, putting its total market capitalization near USD 2 billion. In July 2020, the price of Dogecoin spiked following a TikTok trend aiming to get the coin's price to $1. In January 2021, Dogecoin went up over 800% in 24 hours, attaining a price of $0.07, as a result of attention from Reddit users, partially encouraged by Elon Musk and the GameStop short squeeze. In February 2021, Dogecoin hit a new high price of $0.08 following Twitter encouragement from Musk, Snoop Dogg and Gene Simmons. In March 2021, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban announced his NBA team would allow purchasing tickets and products with Dogecoin; within two days, Cuban had declared his franchise had become the top Dogecoin merchant, having carried out 20,000 transactions. In April 2021, Dogecoin and other cryptocurrencies surged, stimulated in part by the direct listing for cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase on April 14, although that platform did not provide trading of Dogecoin. Its price first reached $0.10 on April 14, before hitting a new high of $0.45 on April 16 (up 400% that week), with a volume of nearly $70 billion traded in the preceding 24 hours. At the time, Dogecoin's market capitalization approached $50 billion, making it the fifth-highest-valued cryptocurrency; its value had increased more than 7,000% year-to-date. Interest in Dogecoin contributed to an outage in electronic trading platform Robinhood's cryptocurrency system on April 15, caused by "unprecedented demand", and prompted concerns from experts of a nearing speculative bubble in the cryptocurrency market. On May 4, 2021, the value of Dogecoin first surpassed the symbolic hurdle of $0.50, a greater than 20,000% increase in one year. On May 8, 2021, despite, or perhaps because of expectations of a surge in interest in Dogecoin resulting from Elon Musk's appearance on Saturday Night Live, Dogecoin dropped 34% from $0.711 at the opening of the show to below $0.470 45 minutes later. By the following morning Dogecoin hit a swing low of $0.401, a cumulative drop of 43.6% and lost value of $35 billion. On May 9, 2021, SpaceX announced a rideshare mission to the Moon completely funded by Dogecoin, thus becoming the first space mission funded by a cryptocurrency. Elon Musk confirmed this news via Twitter. DOGE-1 will be a minor 40 kg rideshare payload on Intuitive Machines' IM-1 mission in Q1 2022. On August 14, 2021, the Dogecoin Foundation announced the "re-establishment of the Dogecoin Foundation (est 2014), with a renewed focus on supporting the Dogecoin Ecosystem, Community and promoting the future of the Dogecoin Blockchain." The Foundation was reinvigorated by the addition to its Board of notable advisors such as Vitalik Buterin (Etherium co-founder and inventor) and Jared Birchall (representing Elon Musk). 3. Why call it a speculation/gambling in the "zero-sum game"? Dogecoin is not another kind of bitcoin but a hype currency that has no practical meaning in the capital market. It is not only related to the most naked speculation: in the world of cryptocurrency lacking supervision, the ups and downs of Dogecoins and the chasing ups and downs of investors are more extreme and crazy. It is a window to observe the changes that are taking place in the financial sector. It is also related to the brainstorming imagination: in addition to the existing financial system, explore a new system-some people imagine that this new system also has "gold", currency and exchanges... and they are all established on the decentralized network, Dogecoin will be part of this future picture. Dogecoin does not have a supply cap like other cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin with its capped supply of 21 million coins. Dogecoin instead deliberately has a stable, "deterministic inflation" rate of 10,000 Dogecoin per block, with a block time of one minute. Exactly five billion new Dogecoin will be created and enter circulation every year. If Bitcoin is a rebellion against the traditional financial system, Dogecoin is a rebellion against Bitcoin. It dispels one of the main characteristics of Bitcoin-the total amount is fixed and cannot be overissued. However, the fact is, different from gold, other precious metals, even bitcoins, Dogecoin itself has no monetary value. Therefore, what is supporting Dogecoin's skyrocketing and falling? A currency market truth: all current currencies are a zero-sum game. The blockchain technology itself does not exert much practical value! It is more like a speculative behavior: under the response of the leaders of the currency circle, fans-or speculators-frantically hyped up the atmosphere, the value of Dogecoin has surged in a short period of time, thus it attracts more "new fans" to try to join and share a cup soup. However, as more and more people joined, the initially hyped group of "speculators" sold in a timely manner at the highest price point, and then the currency price plummeted, and the "followers" who joined afterwards could only buy at high prices and sell at low prices. In other words, in this zero-sum game, the part of the funds earned by the beneficiaries is exactly the price difference in the process of "surge and collapse." A similar story is that of GEM stock price. The Reddit community is the birthplace of WSB. The full name of WSB is r/WallStreetBets. It is a stock trading sub-forum on Reddit that gathers a large number of retail investors who use US stocks as casinos. These retail investors launched a war against Wall Street short-selling institutions in late January this year. They once pushed the stock of the previously bankrupt offline game retailer GameStop for $18 to $483 (NYSE listed company, Stock code GEM). However, after the frenzied hype, the profit-seekers left with the difference in profits, and the "speculators" who joined afterwards became the "high-level price" crowd "trapped" by the stock market. Similar to the plot of GME, the price of Dogecoin rose rapidly after a short period of time and then fell rapidly. The trend of rapid rise and fall is very dangerous for investors who buy call options. If the operation is not timely when the U-turn falls, the position may be liquidated. The use of call options is exactly what WSB retail investors used to increase leverage when they exploded in buying GME. What is cryptocurrency? For retail investors who continue to run short, it is the disillusionment of the desire to get rich; for market makers, it is a real arbitrage opportunity; for institutions, it is a new asset type; for regulators, it is a new thing that urgently needs regulation; for a person with great curiosity, it is a research object for observation.

Materials used: network nodes; cryptography; blockchain; Mining; code; Dogetipbot

Credit: Wikipedia; Zhihu; BBC news; Coindesk; Coinbase……

Size: Like a normal Pound coin- 2cm*2cm

Creation date: 2013/12/06 00:00:00

Alternate titles: cryptocurrency

External link: https://dogechain.info/

Tags: 3, 8

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