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Dogecoin has been heard everywhere since April of this year, but among the craziness all around Dogecoin do you know its story?
The Creation
Dogecoin was created on December 2013, almost 8 years ago, by two software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer.
Billy Markus
Former IBM programmer in Portland, Oregon, Billy Markus tried once to mine Bitcoin with his computer, but found this process very slow and expensive, he therefore wanted a cryptocurrency open to the masses, to all the people, without necessarily having to be rich to own some. He tried to create a crypto by himself, named "Bells", based on the currency used in the Animal Crossing series. The try was a failure.
Jackson Palmer
Former member of the Adobe Systems team in Sydney, Jackson Palmer was surprised by the competition in the cryptocurrencies market in which many people were trying to join. He discovered that there was a huge market with new coins coming out every day, supposed going to be worth thousands, even millions of dollars and invade the galaxy, especially the moon! He found this stupid and given the number of coins that came out, he thought that it was probably easy to create one. Surfing the web, he found a meme of a yellow Shiba Inu staring at the camera in a funny way.
Source
I went to coinmarket.com and I noticed at that point that maybe under a hundred cryptocurrencies out there [...] and I noticed new ones were being added pretty regularly. [...] and Adrian Chen a journalist over Gawker had written this article basically saying doge is the best meme because it’s kind of this incorruptible face [...] I just had those two kind of tabs open in my browser and Doge and coin just kind of blended together. And so it started as a tweet.[...] I was like go and invest in Dogecoin I think it’s the next big thing, and that kind of sparked the whole thing. - Jackson Palmer
From his tweet, Jackson Palmer got a lot of enthusiastic response. In addition to his addiction into buying website domain names he said:
I’m one of those people that if I have an idea, I gotta buy the domain name. - Jackson Palmer
Therefore, with the intention to launch a joke, as a parody of all the coins already on the market, which were all looking the same, he bought dogecoin.com domain name, downloaded the picture of the Shiba Inu and created a photo montage of the dog on a coin and uploaded it:
He also left a note on the website:
if you want to make Dogecoin a reality, contact us - Jackson Palmer, dogecoin.com
One day, Billy Markus found Jackson Palmer's note on dogecoin.com and felt like his cryptocurrency project, with the Shiba Inu dog that was very popular and funny all around the internet thanks to the meme, had all the specifications of what he was trying to do, a joke! Therefore, Billy Markus contacted Jackson Palmer to propose him to work together, as a duo, on the development of Dogecoin.
Jackson Palmer (left) and Billy Markus (right), founders of Dogecoin
Billy Markus reconfigured "Bells" source code, which came from Bitcoin's open-source code so that it fitted the Dogecoin meme. It took him about 3 hours to do this, changed the font text display, some graphics, the user interface and at the end, voila!
In those days, they did not think Dogecoin would have been popular but mostly a joke, therefore they did not propose any airdrop, ICO or pre-mined coin. With the idea of trying their mining process, even though Dogecoin mining difficulty is not the hardest one, after five minutes of mining on Billy Markus' gaming computer the difficulty was too hard to be worth to continue. By being the only one mining on the network, as I understood, they mined for about 5,000 $ worth of Dogecoin together and they never held more of them.
The Mining Process
To not stop the joke, the mining process was even a joke. Jackson Palmer explains it in this cropped video interview:
We were like how do we make this as ridiculous as possible? [...] this whole notion of random block rewards built in. And so our whole thing with those coins was how do we make this so that miners are going to get angry with it and not keep mining it because it can’t be profitable. - Jackson Palmer
You can find the all interview here and the transcript here. Basically, what they first did was having the mining reward inspired by what Lucky Coin project did. That project offered a x2 ,x5 and even x58 block reward according to... luck! Now the coin is a Deadcoin ^^ So, what the duo of the Dogecoin team did, was creating Dogecoin mining reward "randomly" from nothing to 1,000,000 Dogecoin reward. But this system did not work well, in fact, the payout got as a mining reward was generated using the hash of the previous block found. Therefore, the previous block was determining the next block reward. Some people noticed that and therefore only came mining Dogecoin when it was supposed to be near a high block reward. For instance, here are some wallets that understood the trick and got a very high average mining reward compared to others:
Source
To solve this problem, the duo decided to put a static mining reward of 10,000 DOGE per block.
The Supply Limit
[...] it’s actually a bug in the code. So back in the day when you used to like just fork a coin to make an old coin there were a series of magic numbers, some like variables in the code, which you would change like Max money I think was the one that we changed, and we just thought that putting a hundred billion there would mean that the cap of the coin was a hundred billion. We didn’t know what we were doing, and so funny story actually. - Jackson Palmer
Even this story highlights the full joke of the project! By mistake, they thought putting a 100,000,000,000 supply limit for the coin, by changing some lines in the code they recycled, would work to regulate the supply limit, but it was not that simple.
Part of the team working hard in these days :)
Jae Kwon, founder of Cosmos (ATOM), noticed it back in the days and put a message on a GitHub thread about the issue.
Therefore, Dogecoin is one of the crypto assets which has no supply limit. Currently, according to Coingecko, and CoinMarketCap, there are 129,680,464,938 of DOGE in circulation. We can say that, with no cap reachable, mining could be possible until the death of the coin (if it dies ^^).
What Was Dogecoin Mainly Used For?
Here are some examples of what DOGE was mainly used for.
Tips
By being worth only micropennies, Dogecoin was very used as a tipping mechanism on Reddit.
Source
The Dogecoin community especially made a clear tutorial on how to tip through Reddit! The reward system aimed for tipping one another on Reddit with Dogecoin because of being affordable for users.
Recently a Reddit thread, proposing to add this kind of tips on Twitter was made, following this tweet:
Sponsorships
Josh Wise supposed to drive a Chevrolet SS with the number 98 during NASCAR championship, had no sponsorship for the races making his team an underfunded one. The hole Dogecoin community came up with an idea to raise money for it. Here are some Reddit threads: one and an other. After contacting Josh Wise, a 50,000 $ amount was necessary to have a full on wrap for the car. At the end, almost 60 Million Doge were raised!
Some commentary during the race:
Source
Another sponsorship was done with the Jamaica's bobsled team. This team qualified for the Winter Olympics in Sochi, but due to not having enough money, the team was not able to attend the competition... Once again, the Dogecoin community got involved in the project! A Dogecoin address was created and in a Reddit thread, donations were asked. More than 26 million of Dogecoins worth about $33,000 have been donated to the Jamaica's bobsled team.
Here is a picture of the team with all the money raised thanks to all involved in:
These sponsorships enabled to make dreams come true and also highlighted the Dogecoin project in those days.
Donations
Dogecoin community acted to fund the creation of two water wells in the Tana River area of Eastern Kenya to collect clean water.
Source
At the end about 40 million, worth more than $33,000 at the current exchange rates were raised!
Social Networks
Here are some useful links about the Dogecoin team:
- Website
- Reddit Community
- Coingecko
- Source code
The parole is yours!
So, after all you read, what do you think about Dogecoin's story? Did you know it? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section.
