Dogecoin has been around since late 2013, starting as a joke initially. The was designed as a satirical homage to Bitcoin. Besides being a joke and a meme coin, Dogecoin wasn’t intended to serve any other purpose. Yet, you can use it to transfer value.
Here’s a list of five interesting facts about Dogecoin:
The cult surrounding Dogecoin still attracts new users to the cryptocurrency industry. Therefore, for many people, it serves as an entry point to the crypto world. On top of that, Dogecoin hosts a very approachable community that catapulted DOGE to cult status.
It’s important to know that the currency did not receive active maintenance until 2021. That’s when the Dogecoin Foundation was reinvigorated. More on that below.
Presently, the network is being secured by miners, just like the Bitcoin network. For each block that is mined, miners receive 10,000 Dogecoins as a reward.
The Dogecoin Foundation, which was introduced many years ago but was relatively inactive, was rebooted in 2021 with a brand new advisory board. It included notable names such as Elon Musk and Vitalik Buterin.
The Foundation itself was originally established as a non-profit back in 2014, but it didn’t see much action.
When the core developers relaunched the initiative, an excerpt from the announcement read:
We are here to accelerate the development effort by supporting current Dogecoin Core and future Dogecoin Developers to work on a full-time basis through sponsorship, as well as providing a welcome landing for new contributors hoping to help with the project.
In December 2021, the Foundation announced that it’s working with Buterin to create a PoS-based community staking system. In 2023, they announced a new core development fund with five custodians.
Users can now follow the Foundation’s website for regular updates here.
Let’s take a look at Dogecoin’s design characteristics:
Dogecoin’s blockchain works like any other layer-one blockchain. Blocks are chained together using a hashing algorithm, and outputs can be spent. In other words, users can spend their Dogecoins by sending a transaction to a DOGE address.
Next, miners who run nodes receive and validate transactions. Any invalid transactions will be rejected. Of course, valid transactions are added to blocks, which are further added to the blockchain.
On top of that, Dogecoin uses the Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm that Bitcoin also uses. It capitalizes on putting in “work.” Any modern computer can quickly calculate a hash. There’s nothing difficult about that, as it takes less than a second to compute a new hash.
To make it more difficult to mine new blocks, the Dogecoin blockchain introduces a “difficulty” property just like the Bitcoin blockchain. Now, the generated hash must match a specific pattern according to the “difficulty” property.
In other words, the higher the difficulty, the fewer matching hashes are possible. Therefore, it takes longer to generate a hash that matches this particular difficulty. For that reason, people refer to this algorithm as Proof of Work (PoW).
Bitcoin mines a new block every 10 minutes, while for the Dogecoin network, miners generate a new block every minute on average.
Bitcoin implements a hard cap for the total number of Bitcoins that node operators can mine, set at 21 million BTC. To date, over 19.3 million of it has been mined. Once we hit the 21 million mark, nobody would be able to mine more bitcoins. From this point on, miners will only receive transaction fees for finding a matching hash.
Dogecoin takes a different approach to its economic design. The developers went for an inflationary design.
This design choice means that Dogecoin enjoys an infinite supply. As mentioned before, miners receive a reward of 10,000 DOGE coins for each block they mine. Therefore, at the current rate, 14,400,000 DOGE coins are mined daily (= 10,000 DOGE rewards * 24 hours * 60 minutes).
Dogecoin has opted for an inflationary design to replace lost coins. You often see stories about people who lose access to their wallets. In one particular example, a man lost access to his Bitcoin wallet containing 7,002 bitcoins.
Yet, there’s a lot of discussion about inflationary designs (Dogecoin) vs. deflationary designs (Bitcoin). It’s important to note that growth in the money supply does not necessarily lead to inflation.
“Money supply growth doesn’t necessarily lead to inflation if there is an equal growth in the value of the goods and services in an economy. In fact, it could be argued that a productive and growing economy requires a growing money supply to support it.
Though such a system can be more productive over time, it is prone to financial instability due to the difficulty in targeting inflation.” – Reads an article on the matter.
Initially, Dogecoin aimed to reach a stable supply of 100 billion DOGE as their stability point. Though, their supply already surpassed this number and continues to grow. In other words, it’s not easy to find the right balance between usage and inflation.
Elon Musk has shown his interest in Dogecoin several times. In July 2020, he openly endorsed Dogecoin, which resulted in a 14% price increase.
Recently, he started talking about Dogecoin again. On February 15th, Tesla’s founder openly criticized whales (large token holders) for hoarding large amounts of Dogecoin.
According to Musk, this hoarding prevents Dogecoin from becoming the “currency of the internet.” Musk believes that Dogecoin’s large community has the most potential to become an actual currency because of the wide variety of people holding DOGE coins.
Whether Dogecoin will become the “people’s crypto” as Elon Musk envisioned is doubtful. Yet, the cryptocurrency hosts one of the largest communities of all crypto projects. Still, it’s not an ideal candidate to become an official currency because of its lack of technical support and maintenance.
In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter for a whopping $44 billion. Back then, he promised that at some point he would change the platform’s landmark blue bird logo to a Doge, and he did. For a couple of days, the world’s second-largest social media had Doge for its logo. Needless to say, Dogecoin exploded in value but retraced just as quickly shortly after the logo was changed back.
All in all, Dogecoin continues to be the largest meme coin by means of total market cap and has also given birth to an entire subsection in the cryptocurrency industry. It inspired the likes of Shiba Inu (SHIB), Floki Inu (FLOKI) and a cohort of other meme coins that collectively acquired billions in terms of market cap.
