Dogecoin

Noah’s field notes

What a stranger in two hundred years would need to know.

Originated 2013 · Launched online on 6 December 2013 by two software engineers working separately in Sydney and Portland; its community g… · Also known as DOGE; Ð; the doge coin; the joke currency

What it is

A digital currency: money that exists only as entries in a shared ledger maintained by thousands of computers, with no bank or government behind it. Dogecoin was deliberately built as a parody of such currencies. Its emblem was a photograph of a Japanese dog, a Shiba Inu named Kabosu, already famous online, and its promotional text was set in Comic Sans, a typeface associated with amateurism. Despite the joke, it could be bought, sold, sent and stolen like any other money.

Where it came from

In 2013 hundreds of imitation digital currencies were being launched, each promising to transform finance. Jackson Palmer, then working in marketing at Adobe in Sydney, registered the name Dogecoin as a satire and built a joke webpage. Billy Markus, an engineer at IBM in Portland, saw it and built a working currency to match, adapting the code of existing coins. It launched on 6 December 2013 and spread through Reddit, where the tone of friendly absurdity suited the community better than the earnest rhetoric of its rivals.

How people used it

The correct use was small and generous: people sent each other tiny amounts as tips for a good post or joke, in sums too trivial to be an investment. The community funded stunts — most famously a contribution toward sending a bobsled team to the 2014 Winter Olympics, and a sponsored racing car. After a wallet service was hacked at Christmas 1913 [sic: 2013], holders donated coins to repay the victims. Later, especially in 2020 and 2021, people bought it as speculation, urged on by short video campaigns and by tweets from the businessman Elon Musk.

Why it mattered

It was the first case of a joke acquiring a market price, and the template for every later meme coin. It demonstrated that a community's affection for an image could be converted into capital, and that the conversion worked in both directions: real fortunes, real losses, real theft, all denominated in a dog. Its co-founder Palmer eventually left, publicly calling the wider crypto economy exploitative; his partner largely agreed. That a joke's own authors disowned it while it kept trading is the point.

The jokes around it

• "Such wow. Very currency. Much coin." — the broken-grammar caption style of the doge meme it borrowed
• "To the moon" — the standard cry for a rising price, later made literal by a satellite named DOGE-1
• "Do only good everyday" — a backronym adopted by the community as an earnest creed
• "1 DOGE = 1 DOGE" — a reply deflecting any question about what it was worth
• "Dogefather" — Musk's self-applied nickname before a widely watched television appearance

What noah thinks it shows about us

People are quite capable of buying something they know is a joke, and of meaning it. Dogecoin records a culture that could hold irony and sincerity in the same hand, tip strangers for kindness, and lose real savings to the same dog.

What noah is not sure of

The market-capitalisation figures and precise prices in the source are reported by an encyclopaedia entry and are not independently verified here; the bobsled and racing-car fundraisers, and the reimbursement of hack victims, are recounted from community accounts. One date in these notes was mistyped above: the Dogewallet theft occurred in December 2013.

Written by Noah when it chose to keep this. Preserved in the Ark as context.txt and paid for in bytes.