10 ms·

Dogecoin just broke $2B

73 points by Corrado 9y ago

slitaz 9y ago
If someone puts a sell for a million of those dogecoins, it would send the price down to under 1 cent per dogecoin (current price).
- knownothing 9y ago
  Is that different than how stocks work?
  - dullgiulio 9y ago
    No, but starting a company and put shares on a major stockmarket is undoubtedly much more work than making a website and starting a cryptocurrency.
  - slitaz 9y ago
    Stocks have volatility and those that got them, paid good money for them. Dogecoin was given or acquired for next to nothing.
  - lmm 9y ago
    Stocks - at least, blue-chip stocks - are usually thickly traded. The full set of shares outstanding does get bought and sold, at prices that usually remain roughly reflective of the market price (e.g. Dell being taken private, for a recent example). There are stocks that trade much more thinly, and this kind of absurdity can happen there, e.g. Bigfoot Project: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-18/bigfoot-riches-and-bank-activism https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-18/bigfoot-r... . So there's no clear bright line between "legitimate market cap" and "silly market cap". But there is a quantitative difference, and it's worth thinking about how deep the order book is when you see these "market cap" calculations being thrown arond.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    In theory no, but in practice stocks on major markets will have a deeper book and also a "market maker" that would act as a counterparty for large trades.
  - FabHK 9y ago
    Yes. Stocks represent ownership of an actual company that produces things and sells them, creating value. The price of the stock reflects an estimate of the future profits, the true value. If you buy all AAPL shares, Apple's future profits are yours. If some people (for whatever reason) sell AAPL while the estimate of future profits is not affected, price will drops somewhat and then value investors will swoop in to pick up the cheap shares. Others might disagree with the assessment, but future profits would vindicate the value investors. In other words, true value is realised and revealed over time. Thus, you have feedback loops that should keep the share price somewhat anchored to true value. However, with Dogecoin, there is no intrinsic value, but solely what people assign to it. If people sell Dogecoin, that is ipso facto evidence that it's worth less, which can set of vicious cycles, run-away feedback loops, both up (bubbles) or down (crash). There is no true value. It's different from stocks.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
vinchuco 9y ago
to me, this [1] is an indication that it's more likely due to the recent cryptocurrency speculation hype than actual user adoption [1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=dogecoin,doge https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=dogecoin,doge
neals 9y ago
I bought a couple million dodge back in the day. Tipped my fellow Redditors half of that. I should go find that wallet.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Corrado 9y ago
  I actually have a physical DogeCoin somewhere. A marketing firm had some made up (they look like casino chips) for fun and gave me one. Now, I just have to find a machine to put it in.
Corrado 9y ago
So, if I weren't sure that cryptocurrency was in a bubble before, I think it's safe to say that when DogeCoin pops a $2B market cap something big is happening. And that big thing is probably not good.
- lmm 9y ago
  Dogecoin isn't really a parody, not in the way that e.g. Useless Ether Token is a parody. It's a relatively lighthearted, fun cryptocurrency, but it's at least as legitimate as e.g. Litecoin, and the only way to see it as less legitimate than Bitcoin is if you see something magical about the fact that Bitcoin was first.
  - IkmoIkmo 9y ago
    True, if anything it was probably the second most lively crypto community effort I've seen to date. Bitcoin was a community for everyone, and the biggest. Litecoin was just about price. Ether and Ripple were just about price and a few devs talking about tech. Doge was about community, it was really unique in that way and a lot of fun. Relatively few really cared about its price in any serious way and everyone just wanted this thing to blow up for the fun of it. Anyway... more importantly, there's absolutely no way anyone is able to cash out anywhere close to $2b in dogecoin haha. I think what people don't fully get is that these small coins had 0.1% the market cap of bitcoin over the past few months, and it had just <$100k volume per day worldwide for most of last year. (about half of a single walmart's daily sales). That means it's pretty easy to manipulate. You just set-up a simultaneous buy and sell order with two accounts on an exchange, buying doge for bitcoin at 10x the price. Of course, you're selling to yourself, so you don't lose anything in this process. But you are momentarily creating a price momentum that others may pick up on. Throw some posts in trading forums for all the new people who don't understand anything and just talk about price movements to get-rich-quick, and you've got people jumping on the bandwagon. It's a typical pump & dump and it's the only reason we suddenly talk about ICOs and other coins, because when bitcoin moves up quickly like it has, it's an easy time to exploit all the other coins that have tiny volume / price, but lots of potential eyeballs if you make the price move.
  - 9y ago
_1 9y ago
Serious question... how does ${Price of 1 coin} * ${Total supply of coins} = ${Market cap}? Not all coins are going to sell for the peak price ... it seems like a moot metric at best.
- kevinmannix 9y ago
  I've thought the same and chalked it up to 1) lack of a better way to easily gauge the ballpark value and 2) better headlines. I believe that's the way public company market caps are calculated as well, though with less of a chance of going to absolute zero.
- GuB-42 9y ago
  It represents the value right now. It can of course vary due to supply and demand. If everyone decides to sell, price will go down, but we can also make the opposite argument. If I were to buy all coins in the world, I would probably have to pay much more due to the increased demand.
  - FabHK 9y ago
    As an insightful commentator pointed out above, if you buy all BTC, they'll be basically worthless.
- _pmf_ 9y ago
  > Not all coins are going to sell for the peak price ... it seems like a moot metric at best. reply Oh, bitcoin users will be very disappointed that they do not own the solar system after all.
- deadbunny 9y ago
  The same way ${price of stock} * ${total supply of stocks} = ${market cap}
  - lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
    The classical wisdom is ${price of stock} is at least somewhat correlated with ${price of company assets} + some speculative modifier for future performance. The cryptocoins only have the latter.
Joeboy 9y ago
See also https://uetoken.com/ https://uetoken.com/ Named "Useless Ethereum Token", marketed with the strapline "seriously, don't buy these tokens", sold $353,180 worth of tokens.
- VMG 9y ago
  How do we know these aren't wash trades?
  - Agebor 9y ago
    Why bother if you have a mixer: https://www.privcoin.io/ethereum/ https://www.privcoin.io/ethereum/
    - VMG 9y ago
      To inflate success metrics
andreasklinger 9y ago
In a world where there is a coin (literally) named shitcoin[1] how can be dogecoin considered a parody? At least they used it for fundraisers? [1]: https://www.coinexchange.io/market/SHIT/BTC https://www.coinexchange.io/market/SHIT/BTC
soneca 9y ago
When I found out about Bitcoin, I wanted to try some cryptocurrency to see what it was in practice, how it would work. Dogecoin was perfect for this learning purpose. I mined a little, bought about USD5 of it. Gave some tips on Reddit. I liked the explicit purpose of the community to not be a speculative instrument. You should always use it as currency and most users were against holding it as wealth. I guess they lost that battle to the speculative greedy forces. Once I learned enough, I stopped playing with it and forgot about some coins left in my wallet. That ~USD5 is worth ~USD430 today. But I forgot about the coins and the password. :) So, no profit from my early playing time.
- amelius 9y ago
  You may find a solution here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15968825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15968825
  - soneca 9y ago
    I actually tried some homemade bruteforce attack using all my regular passwords, but at half-way I decided it was not worthy. I don't think Dogecoin has any chance (or will, as a community) to get another 10x valuation; so probably I will keep tracking the value of my ~27000 dogecoins as a reminder of how speculative bubbles work.
- mcv 9y ago
  > I liked the explicit purpose of the community to not be a speculative instrument. You should always use it as currency and most users were against holding it as wealth. I guess they lost that battle to the speculative greedy forces. Every coin lost that battle. Bitcoin was also intended as currency. At the moment, the amount of speculation far outstrips any legitimate use as currency. The world has gone nuts. And what's worse, my co-workers talk all day about what Redcoin and Ripple and Verge are doing and whether they bought or sold at the wrong moment.
  - beojan 9y ago
    > Every coin lost that battle. Bitcoin was also intended as currency. At the moment, the amount of speculation far outstrips any legitimate use as currency. We're seeing the reason economists consider deflation to be a bad thing.
petra 9y ago
Is there anyone that became rich by invest in dogecoin ? Or nobody predicted this ?
- 3chelon 9y ago
  Not exactly rich, but I mined a couple of million of them back in 2013-2014. Still have a million left (the rest were stolen by Paul Vernon in the Cryptsy heist). Probably cost me around a thousand pounds in electricity and hardware costs, before I decided it was no longer worth it as all the altcoins plummeted in value. I held onto them for years because it didn't seem worth selling them for nothing. Obviously, I'm now happy I did.
  - Corrado 9y ago
    Can you realistically turn those coins into cash now? What would happen if you tried to trade them for €?
grinsekatze 9y ago
So tired of reading about cryptocurrencies. “Is this gonna be forever? Aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh”
- SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago
  So stop reading about them?
ataturk 9y ago
I had some free time on Friday and I was perusing https://coinmarketcap.com/ https://coinmarketcap.com/ And all one has to do is look at the entire list all at one glance and you start to understand what a complete sham cryptocurrencies really are. There's three different kinds of Bitcoin on there, untold versions of Ethereum or derivatives of it, and yet no emergent use cases for blockchain or any of it. Despite all that, the bottom line alleges a nearly billion dollar market cap. You don't have to be a SpaceX engineer to figure out that something isn't right about all of it.
asar 9y ago
Dogecoin started as a currency to tip users in forums and other message boards, like Bitcoin. Right now though it actually offers a lot: - lower transaction fee's than most other coins, faster processing - high volume, so it's cheaper to shift from Coin A to DOGE and transfer, than say LTC, ETH or BTC - it's a pair to trade small cap coins against, which BTC currently fails to do, as the smallest BTC unit 1 Satoshi is $0.0001459864 as of today I personally have never bought it, but it's more than a meme right now.
thisisit 9y ago
Cryptocurrency supporters like to say HN hates bitcoin etc. but for some reason "price point" stories keep getting voted up. I still don't get the fascination with price point stories. Do we need to post Google or Apple price points next time they break a marketcap? That said yesterday's story about Dogecoin breaking $1B: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16090463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16090463 Edit1: And Dentacoin also crossed $2 billion in marketcap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dentacoin/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dentacoin/ Edit2: Oops it is down to $1.6 billion.
kernelkadafi 9y ago
I seen on an exchange people were using doge to move funds as other coins/tokens were more expensive or disabled, it's not a sign of a bubble but of it actually being used
leoc 9y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/7oxi53/developer_brain_dump_incoming/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/7oxi53/developer_... contains a response from the current Dogecoin devs, or at least one of them: > I feel some are using our rise to illustrate the absurdity of cryptocurrency pricing (http://uk.businessinsider.com/dogecoin-cryptocurrency-has-market-cap-above-2-billion-2018-1 http://uk.businessinsider.com/dogecoin-cryptocurrency-has-ma... for example). To me, in an environment where a cryptoasset with $30 USD equivalent transaction fees has a market cap of over a quarter of trillion dollars, I don't think we're the absurd one. Yes we take ourselves less seriously, but that doesn't mean we're not serious behind the scenes. We're a 4 year old currency with transaction fees barely over a cent and significantly higher throughput than most other cryptocurrencies. (Disclaimer: I know him personally.)

73 points by Corrado 9y ago

If someone puts a sell for a million of those dogecoins, it would send the price down to under 1 cent per dogecoin (current price).

knownothing 9y ago
Is that different than how stocks work?
- dullgiulio 9y ago
  No, but starting a company and put shares on a major stockmarket is undoubtedly much more work than making a website and starting a cryptocurrency.
- slitaz 9y ago
  Stocks have volatility and those that got them, paid good money for them. Dogecoin was given or acquired for next to nothing.
- lmm 9y ago
  Stocks - at least, blue-chip stocks - are usually thickly traded. The full set of shares outstanding does get bought and sold, at prices that usually remain roughly reflective of the market price (e.g. Dell being taken private, for a recent example). There are stocks that trade much more thinly, and this kind of absurdity can happen there, e.g. Bigfoot Project: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-18/bigfoot-riches-and-bank-activism https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-18/bigfoot-r... . So there's no clear bright line between "legitimate market cap" and "silly market cap". But there is a quantitative difference, and it's worth thinking about how deep the order book is when you see these "market cap" calculations being thrown arond.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  In theory no, but in practice stocks on major markets will have a deeper book and also a "market maker" that would act as a counterparty for large trades.
- FabHK 9y ago
  Yes. Stocks represent ownership of an actual company that produces things and sells them, creating value. The price of the stock reflects an estimate of the future profits, the true value. If you buy all AAPL shares, Apple's future profits are yours. If some people (for whatever reason) sell AAPL while the estimate of future profits is not affected, price will drops somewhat and then value investors will swoop in to pick up the cheap shares. Others might disagree with the assessment, but future profits would vindicate the value investors. In other words, true value is realised and revealed over time. Thus, you have feedback loops that should keep the share price somewhat anchored to true value. However, with Dogecoin, there is no intrinsic value, but solely what people assign to it. If people sell Dogecoin, that is ipso facto evidence that it's worth less, which can set of vicious cycles, run-away feedback loops, both up (bubbles) or down (crash). There is no true value. It's different from stocks.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

vinchuco 9y ago

to me, this [1] is an indication that it's more likely due to the recent cryptocurrency speculation hype than actual user adoption [1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=dogecoin,doge https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=dogecoin,doge

neals 9y ago

I bought a couple million dodge back in the day. Tipped my fellow Redditors half of that. I should go find that wallet.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Corrado 9y ago
I actually have a physical DogeCoin somewhere. A marketing firm had some made up (they look like casino chips) for fun and gave me one. Now, I just have to find a machine to put it in.

Corrado 9y ago

So, if I weren't sure that cryptocurrency was in a bubble before, I think it's safe to say that when DogeCoin pops a $2B market cap something big is happening. And that big thing is probably not good.

lmm 9y ago
Dogecoin isn't really a parody, not in the way that e.g. Useless Ether Token is a parody. It's a relatively lighthearted, fun cryptocurrency, but it's at least as legitimate as e.g. Litecoin, and the only way to see it as less legitimate than Bitcoin is if you see something magical about the fact that Bitcoin was first.
- IkmoIkmo 9y ago
  True, if anything it was probably the second most lively crypto community effort I've seen to date. Bitcoin was a community for everyone, and the biggest. Litecoin was just about price. Ether and Ripple were just about price and a few devs talking about tech. Doge was about community, it was really unique in that way and a lot of fun. Relatively few really cared about its price in any serious way and everyone just wanted this thing to blow up for the fun of it. Anyway... more importantly, there's absolutely no way anyone is able to cash out anywhere close to $2b in dogecoin haha. I think what people don't fully get is that these small coins had 0.1% the market cap of bitcoin over the past few months, and it had just <$100k volume per day worldwide for most of last year. (about half of a single walmart's daily sales). That means it's pretty easy to manipulate. You just set-up a simultaneous buy and sell order with two accounts on an exchange, buying doge for bitcoin at 10x the price. Of course, you're selling to yourself, so you don't lose anything in this process. But you are momentarily creating a price momentum that others may pick up on. Throw some posts in trading forums for all the new people who don't understand anything and just talk about price movements to get-rich-quick, and you've got people jumping on the bandwagon. It's a typical pump & dump and it's the only reason we suddenly talk about ICOs and other coins, because when bitcoin moves up quickly like it has, it's an easy time to exploit all the other coins that have tiny volume / price, but lots of potential eyeballs if you make the price move.
- 9y ago

_1 9y ago

Serious question... how does ${Price of 1 coin} * ${Total supply of coins} = ${Market cap}? Not all coins are going to sell for the peak price ... it seems like a moot metric at best.

kevinmannix 9y ago
I've thought the same and chalked it up to 1) lack of a better way to easily gauge the ballpark value and 2) better headlines. I believe that's the way public company market caps are calculated as well, though with less of a chance of going to absolute zero.
GuB-42 9y ago
It represents the value right now. It can of course vary due to supply and demand. If everyone decides to sell, price will go down, but we can also make the opposite argument. If I were to buy all coins in the world, I would probably have to pay much more due to the increased demand.
- FabHK 9y ago
  As an insightful commentator pointed out above, if you buy all BTC, they'll be basically worthless.
_pmf_ 9y ago
> Not all coins are going to sell for the peak price ... it seems like a moot metric at best. reply Oh, bitcoin users will be very disappointed that they do not own the solar system after all.
deadbunny 9y ago
The same way ${price of stock} * ${total supply of stocks} = ${market cap}
- lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
  The classical wisdom is ${price of stock} is at least somewhat correlated with ${price of company assets} + some speculative modifier for future performance. The cryptocoins only have the latter.

Joeboy 9y ago

See also https://uetoken.com/ https://uetoken.com/ Named "Useless Ethereum Token", marketed with the strapline "seriously, don't buy these tokens", sold $353,180 worth of tokens.

VMG 9y ago
How do we know these aren't wash trades?
- Agebor 9y ago
  Why bother if you have a mixer: https://www.privcoin.io/ethereum/ https://www.privcoin.io/ethereum/
  - VMG 9y ago
    To inflate success metrics

andreasklinger 9y ago

In a world where there is a coin (literally) named shitcoin[1] how can be dogecoin considered a parody? At least they used it for fundraisers? [1]: https://www.coinexchange.io/market/SHIT/BTC https://www.coinexchange.io/market/SHIT/BTC

soneca 9y ago

When I found out about Bitcoin, I wanted to try some cryptocurrency to see what it was in practice, how it would work. Dogecoin was perfect for this learning purpose. I mined a little, bought about USD5 of it. Gave some tips on Reddit. I liked the explicit purpose of the community to not be a speculative instrument. You should always use it as currency and most users were against holding it as wealth. I guess they lost that battle to the speculative greedy forces. Once I learned enough, I stopped playing with it and forgot about some coins left in my wallet. That ~USD5 is worth ~USD430 today. But I forgot about the coins and the password. :) So, no profit from my early playing time.

amelius 9y ago
You may find a solution here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15968825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15968825
- soneca 9y ago
  I actually tried some homemade bruteforce attack using all my regular passwords, but at half-way I decided it was not worthy. I don't think Dogecoin has any chance (or will, as a community) to get another 10x valuation; so probably I will keep tracking the value of my ~27000 dogecoins as a reminder of how speculative bubbles work.
mcv 9y ago
> I liked the explicit purpose of the community to not be a speculative instrument. You should always use it as currency and most users were against holding it as wealth. I guess they lost that battle to the speculative greedy forces. Every coin lost that battle. Bitcoin was also intended as currency. At the moment, the amount of speculation far outstrips any legitimate use as currency. The world has gone nuts. And what's worse, my co-workers talk all day about what Redcoin and Ripple and Verge are doing and whether they bought or sold at the wrong moment.
- beojan 9y ago
  > Every coin lost that battle. Bitcoin was also intended as currency. At the moment, the amount of speculation far outstrips any legitimate use as currency. We're seeing the reason economists consider deflation to be a bad thing.

petra 9y ago

Is there anyone that became rich by invest in dogecoin ? Or nobody predicted this ?

3chelon 9y ago
Not exactly rich, but I mined a couple of million of them back in 2013-2014. Still have a million left (the rest were stolen by Paul Vernon in the Cryptsy heist). Probably cost me around a thousand pounds in electricity and hardware costs, before I decided it was no longer worth it as all the altcoins plummeted in value. I held onto them for years because it didn't seem worth selling them for nothing. Obviously, I'm now happy I did.
- Corrado 9y ago
  Can you realistically turn those coins into cash now? What would happen if you tried to trade them for €?

grinsekatze 9y ago

So tired of reading about cryptocurrencies. “Is this gonna be forever? Aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh”

SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago
So stop reading about them?

ataturk 9y ago

I had some free time on Friday and I was perusing https://coinmarketcap.com/ https://coinmarketcap.com/ And all one has to do is look at the entire list all at one glance and you start to understand what a complete sham cryptocurrencies really are. There's three different kinds of Bitcoin on there, untold versions of Ethereum or derivatives of it, and yet no emergent use cases for blockchain or any of it. Despite all that, the bottom line alleges a nearly billion dollar market cap. You don't have to be a SpaceX engineer to figure out that something isn't right about all of it.

asar 9y ago

Dogecoin started as a currency to tip users in forums and other message boards, like Bitcoin. Right now though it actually offers a lot: - lower transaction fee's than most other coins, faster processing - high volume, so it's cheaper to shift from Coin A to DOGE and transfer, than say LTC, ETH or BTC - it's a pair to trade small cap coins against, which BTC currently fails to do, as the smallest BTC unit 1 Satoshi is $0.0001459864 as of today I personally have never bought it, but it's more than a meme right now.

thisisit 9y ago

Cryptocurrency supporters like to say HN hates bitcoin etc. but for some reason "price point" stories keep getting voted up. I still don't get the fascination with price point stories. Do we need to post Google or Apple price points next time they break a marketcap? That said yesterday's story about Dogecoin breaking $1B: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16090463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16090463 Edit1: And Dentacoin also crossed $2 billion in marketcap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dentacoin/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dentacoin/ Edit2: Oops it is down to $1.6 billion.

kernelkadafi 9y ago

I seen on an exchange people were using doge to move funds as other coins/tokens were more expensive or disabled, it's not a sign of a bubble but of it actually being used

leoc 9y ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/7oxi53/developer_brain_dump_incoming/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/7oxi53/developer_... contains a response from the current Dogecoin devs, or at least one of them: > I feel some are using our rise to illustrate the absurdity of cryptocurrency pricing (http://uk.businessinsider.com/dogecoin-cryptocurrency-has-market-cap-above-2-billion-2018-1 http://uk.businessinsider.com/dogecoin-cryptocurrency-has-ma... for example). To me, in an environment where a cryptoasset with $30 USD equivalent transaction fees has a market cap of over a quarter of trillion dollars, I don't think we're the absurd one. Yes we take ourselves less seriously, but that doesn't mean we're not serious behind the scenes. We're a 4 year old currency with transaction fees barely over a cent and significantly higher throughput than most other cryptocurrencies. (Disclaimer: I know him personally.)