Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Dogecoin: Explained”.
Hey what’s up mkbhd here back with another tech, video kinda, let’s talk about dogecoin, so you might have seen this all over twitter for the past couple of weeks or months, this seemingly random crypto coming out of nowhere coming from a few fractions of a penny. All the way up to a few cents on its way to who knows what powered by rocket emojis, shiba e news and elon musk tweets kind of random, but in the tech world it’s it’s been kind of fascinating to watch what’s been going on here and so On this topic that i think i would i would normally have on my podcast on on the waveform podcast shameless plug um, i felt like it would make a fun video to sort of unpack. How i look at what’s been going on here. This video is not official financial advice, i’m not an expert, it’s not the type of thing you should probably get from a youtuber anyway, but i’m not responsible for anything. You may do or decide to do after watching this video. So okay, dogecoin is a cryptocurrency. So, in order to understand basically what’s happening with it, you should understand what cryptocurrencies are and so i’ll just use bitcoin the most prominent one. As my example here so bitcoin’s been around since 2009, it’s the most prominent largest uh crypto by market cap, but to oversimplify it’s basically a decentralized digital currency. It’S an unregulated, highly volatile digital currency built on blockchain, but of course bitcoin’s. Not the only one. There are tons of other currencies based on the same thing but like based on alterations of the same rules, so they’re alternate coins, they’re called altcoins and there’s a lot of them.
The thing is, almost anyone can make an altcoin eventually like it’s actually fairly impressive. How easy it is to make, and so there are tons of them and they’re all built on like different little tweaks and versions of the same fundamentals and pretty much all of them will claim to be better than bitcoin in some way debatable. But there’s a lot of them out there, which is the point and uh you might have heard of some of these. So there’s ethereum, there’s litecoin stellar ripple dash neo. You can literally just open up coinbase and sort through tons and tons of them, and this is just a small fraction there’s at this point, i’m going to say probably thousands of different altcoins to pick from and they’re all basically trying to give you some reason for Them to catch on some reason that they’re, better than bitcoin to invest in or use and then there’s dogecoin dogecoin was literally started as a joke as a tweet by jackson palmer.
While he was walking at adobe sort of literally making fun of how many alt coins there were like. Oh, what imagine there was this shiba inu powered doge coin and the coin had a little picture of the meme on it and it just kind of hooked on a lot and got traction from there. It’S like one of those jokes that catches on so much.
It becomes more than the joke, it like outgrows itself and it becomes a real thing. So he collaborated with billy, marcus from ibm and uh. They gave it a logo registered it launched it built the thing and now it’s real. So, okay, fundamentally we know what dogecoin is as an alternate crypto, but i think the reason that it’s caught back on and stuck around for as long as it has is much more interesting to me, see the thing you start to notice about cryptocurrencies is they all Take themselves very seriously, and they should because they’re they exist in different worlds.
For great reasons. I actually really like the idea of bitcoin. I think, having like a global currency makes sense in the age of the internet we live in, but now that there are so many altcoins, it can feel kind of overwhelming to sort through them all and find out which ones are useful, which ones are good. Short-Term versus long-term investments, which ones you can buy, that may actually make you money, that’s what everyone wants to know and everyone kind of like stocks.
Everyone wants to find that hidden gem of like a young, smaller crypto that has just the right combination of things that it’s going to grow and turn into this massive important thing, and so that gets people investing in all kinds of small, very young crypto. That eventually gets you in the murky waters of possible scams and and pump and dump schemes and things that you probably shouldn’t be investing in so dogecoin seems like it’s caught on because it started as a joke and then and now people are taking it super seriously. But also kind of as a joke, but also kind of for real. Does that make sense, so, graham stefan, who knows way more about finance than me, made a really great video about dogecoin like a day or two ago, where and i’ll link his video below? You should watch the whole thing, but he makes a really great point, which is that? Because it started as a harmless joke and because it’s obvious, the founders aren’t really doing this for the money.
And it’s just such a sort of a jokey thing in its origin. That actually makes it in this world of crypto that takes itself super seriously. It makes it more accessible, it makes it less intimidating. It makes it more likely to succeed because of how obvious it is that they’re, not trying and so graham brings up. This example of the same thing with someone named will rogers who ran for president in 1928 and won on a joke campaign and then eventually resigned could have been president.
But the whole point of his campaign was to show how dumb it was and mock the whole process, and so that was like the dogecoin of politicians, but i also have an example of like the equal but opposite situation. Um in my own inbox, i got an email about sponsor potential sponsorship integration and i i say no to 99.999 of the emails that i get about stuff like this, but i always like to hear them out in case there’s potential in this deal. Let’S figure out what it is, so i get this email, so this one said they just wanted to tweet and that they already have participation from lindsay lohan, amanda, cerny, neo, lil, yachty and more i’m i’m like all right.
That’S an interesting group. It’S an interesting email! So, okay, what what is the campaign for and it turned out it’s for – tron, a cryptocurrency that they’re, i guess paying people to tweet about and clearly they care a lot about people caring about it if they want lindsay lohan to promote it. I guess i mean i don’t i don’t know who gets their financial advice from nevermind, but the more i read into this email, the more sketchy it is. They mention they’re, often referred to as the ethereum killer, whatever you say, uh and that they need to make it look like it’s, not a sponsored tweet, and then they linked three example tweets one from lindsay lohan, neo and lil yachty, which i clicked on, none of Which were even marked as an ad by the way like i hate, i, don’t i’m not trying to call people out on this, but that is pretty cringe behavior, but the point of me bringing this up is this – is this is like the opposite end of the The dogecoin strategy, where they clearly take themselves way too seriously, where they have people with stakes in it, paying people to talk about it, to hopefully get it more attention and to boost volume and to boost prices, and a strategy like that comes off as so insincere And so try hard that, like just look at the comments everybody people are already turned off by it.
Actually, people kind of hate it, and so dogecoin, on the other hand, is, is being boosted literally by people meaning online and the owners, because i think they realize that it’s never been meant to be taken. That seriously have just been using that press and using money. They get from it from for honestly, the best causes possible they’ve used the press to their advantage and have donated gains to meaningful causes like they’ve donated fifty thousand dollars to raise awareness of kenya’s water crisis and, graham stefan pointed out 25 000 to get the jamaican Bobsled team to the olympics, that is, a cool runnings movie reference, incredible movie, hilarious movie.
If you haven’t seen it, you should just making sure everybody caught that. But the point is the it felt like it felt like the crypto for the people like the more accessible, less intimidating version for the people. The smaller price made it ideal for things like uh micro tipping on social media websites like reddit. Would let you just tip in dogecoin if you wanted to and then lately of course, elon musk seems to be really enjoying it um i mean we’ve he’s always been specifically into like memeing on twitter for a long time anyway. Uh, but obviously he’s he’s all in.
Like if you look at his twitter over the past like month or two, it’s just been all dogecoin and then, if you watch the price and volume of dogecoin go up the more he tweets about it and then it’ll sort of simmer down and die off. After a while and then he’ll tweet about it again and it’ll it’ll kick up, i bet if you drew a volume graph of how many times, people trade and talk about it. It would be your right, lock, step in line with elon’s tweets. That’S just the way it is but hey in this world of unregulated decentralized, cryptocurrencies, that’s fair game.
So at least now we understand the memes about dogecoin going all the way up to a dollar. I think it’s at like five and a half cents right now, something like that do i think it’ll ever get up to a dollar, probably not, but again this isn’t financial advice, but anyway, in summary, dogecoin has caught on as an altcoin, but also as a meme. Not just because people seem to be rallying against wall street against that’s the whole big financial institution, that’s kind of had its way forever, but also because of the meme and like the doge himself.
I feel like this meme has a longer shelf life than most. It feels like the currency of internet attention now, as far as, if you should invest or not, this video is still not financial advice. So again, i’m not responsible for anything.
You may do or think about doing after watching what i say, but i think it is actually a fun harmless, cryptocurrency to at least get started with and and begin to mess around with to understand the inner workings of how it works, how the trading works. What apps you like to use things like that? I wouldn’t invest any money that you’re uncomfortable with turning to zero dollars because it could. But i think once you’re done messing with that.
Then you can take those learnings and apply it to other future investments, because it’s always a good idea to have a diverse set of investments. That’S financial 101, but in the meantime it feels good to be in on the joke. Now feels good to understand it. People are going to ride this either to the moon or till it dies, because that’s what the internet does with every joke. Thanks for watching catch, you guys the next one peace .