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The rise of Dogecoin, the internet's hottest cryptocurrency
- kadalashvili 13y agoProbably this week's best internet cryptocurrency.
- DannoHung 13y agoWhether you think Doge is funny-money or not (I think it is), the thing I like about it is that it's changing hands (even if it's just for tipping people for making funny comments) and not really being hoarded for value. At least not yet. Hopefully not ever.
- Torn 13y agoFrom the article: > This week, transactions worth a total of $US14 million were made, including one Chinese investor who bought $US5 million worth of the virtual currency
- kale 13y agoMaybe a casual usage currency would compliment the more serious (and polarizing) BTC or LTC. There were comedy coins before though, I suppose the meme is the only reason Doge has taken off.
- TeMPOraL 13y agoExactly. Relevant xkcd illustrating the phenomenon: http://xkcd.com/1102/ http://xkcd.com/1102/
- mvleming 13y agoI just laughed out loud. Thanks!
- mcantelon 13y agoThere's never been a coin that's been adopted anywhere nearly as quickly (which isn't to say it won't happen again, but it's definitely unusually successful).
- mrfusion 13y agoI'm thinking this will be the first viable micropayments platform which is very exciting. It seems like that would open up a ton of new opportunities but for the life of me, I can't think of any good uses for micropayments (beyond paying for content). Any ideas, HN?
- donquichotte 13y agoTips for good stack overflow answers maybe?
- mrfusion 13y agoI would totally implement that, but I'm worried it would offend Stack Overflow users. (They seem to be offended easily. Probably by half the questions asked :-) It's probably as simple as repurposing the reddit tip bot. I think it's open source, no?
- scardine 13y agoPlease, go ahead. Few people would complain about getting money tips, even if it is funny money. It will just add to the game.
- _wdh 13y agoI'm not sure that there are any opportunities for micropayments. It seems like a solution looking for a problem.
- randallsquared 13y agoSpam elimination. It's true that mail clients and servers are pretty good at removing spam from our mailboxes these days, but there's still all the busywork that they're doing to send and receive stuff that ultimately never gets seen. A micropayment messaging service could greatly reduce the amount of spam that is actually sent, while allowing through messages that the sender is willing to pay servers to process. Doing this via a global blockchain might not be viable, of course.
- viach 13y agoWill HN ever integrate Doge tips?
- mrfusion 13y agoI think we should. What would it take? I think it can be done by a third party, no? It wouldn't require any changes on the HN code.
- vezzy-fnord 13y agoIf HN is ever going to include a cryptocurrency tipping system (spoiler alert: it won't), why should it integrate Dogecoin?
- viach 13y agoWhy not? PS. Spoilers break the intrigue.
- Torn 13y agoDoable in a browser extension, possibly
- viach 13y agoWith a browser extension you can integrate crypto tipping into every website. (Did i just missed my chance to create a startup? Investors, anyone? :)
- paromi 13y agoits a good ideea, but maybe it should be something on a site, installing an extension is not that easy and straight forward. like a tipping website (online wallet) , by username , or email
- viach 13y ago>> is not that easy and straight forward It's as easy as clicking "install" i think. The extension itself is not complex to implement at all and it could be done in a week or so. The backend is a different story.
- jiggy2011 13y agoIt would be pretty funny if dogecoin became a serious currency that one might use to buy property with for example, but is there any reason it has less chance than bitcoin?
- rthomas6 13y agoOne reason might be there is less technical know-how behind the developers compared to Bitcoin, or so I've read.
- aegiso 13y ago> but is there any reason it has less chance than bitcoin? I suspect serious (TM) business people would less like to associate with a currency based on an internet meme. At least, until its origins are inevitably buried from the public consciousness. I guess it remains to be seen which happens first: there is sufficient infrastructure to deal in realty with cryptocurrencies, or we've forgotten that its foundation is people captioning dog pictures.
- nodata 13y ago> I suspect serious (TM) business people would less like to associate with a currency based on an internet meme You sure? http://www.forbes.com/sites/dalebuss/2014/01/21/how-many-spoofs-can-you-find-in-vw-super-bowl-ad-teaser/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/dalebuss/2014/01/21/how-many-spo...
- gabemart 13y agoMtGox started as a Magic the gathering card exchange. While it's caused some snark, it didn't seem to get in the way of MtGox being the premiere BTC exchange for a while.
- ahoy 13y agoThat's hardly a 1-to-1 comparison. For starters there are a number of large, legitimate businesses that make their money selling MtG cards on the secondary market. Secondly, didn't the folks at mtgox just use the domain name because they already owned it? AFAIK, the mtgox exchange bitcoin didn't grow out of the mtg exchange, it just happened to share a domain name.
- dangrossman 13y agoWhat's the easiest way to buy Dogecoin with USD or BTC? An exchange that doesn't require a drivers license and wait period?
- Karunamon 13y agoWhat worked for me was Paypal USD on Reddit's /r/dogemarket - there are quite a few sellers there, and they're verified good sellers. Took about 10 minutes between posting on thread and getting coins. BTC would take a bit longer just due to verification times.
- GrinningFool 13y agoBe careful with that - increasingly, even verified accounts can't be trusted as they sell their accounts/get their accounts hacked.
- jcfrei 13y agoBuy some bitcoins on your favorite exchange and send them to bter.com
- chrisa 13y agoYou can trade BTC for DOGE at cryptsy.com, vircurex.com and bter.com
- aestra 13y agoI use CoinedUp. They are slow as hell, but free and very easy. Transfer BTC to CoinedUp wallet -> convert BTC to DOGE -> Transfer DOGE to personal wallet.
- xhrpost 13y agoPlenty of them for sale on eBay.
- untog 13y agoThe rise of dogecoin interests me because I think it demonstrates a problem with cryptocurrencies - mining becomes too prohibitive for the end user to do before the currency becomes mainstream. Early on, the opportunity of bitcoin was huge. You mine a little, the value of your coins just keeps on rising. Now you can't mine any meaningful level of currency yourself, so the entry level has raised dramatically. So why not move onto a different currency? Get in early. Get a stack of currency. Then that'll become too difficult to mine and newcomers will move onto the next. And the next.
- driverdan 13y agoWhat are you talking about? The average person may not be able to solo mine a block but you can still earn meaningful quantities through pools.
- untog 13y agoWell, perhaps I should have rephrased - I know you can still earn bitcoin, but you can earn more <newcryptocurrency>. So why not switch? The answer would be "because bitcoin is legitimate and dogecoin isn't" - but I'd argue that bitcoin hasn't gotten there yet. So it's a race, and one that any cryptocurrency is likely to lose.
- _wdh 13y agoBut you'll never be able to earn as much as the average person who happened to start mining a month before you. The people who started first will always have an advantage over you. It all looks a bit like a pyramid scheme.
- TDL 13y agoPlease look up the meaning of pyramid scheme. Whatever crypto-currencies end up being, they are not pyramid schemes.
- bushido 13y agoHow do you define meaningful? For a single novice user this would be the cost of hardware (substantial), opportunity cost from delays in delivery of hardware, decaying returns with exponential increase in difficulty, cost of electricity and opportunity cost. Then it needs to be ascertained if they are mining a commodity or an investment. That is mining to sell (similar to farming and mining minerals, metals etc.) or are they looking to hold it for long periods expecting an appreciation. The later has other practical implications. For the majority of prospective miners, these costs are huge and have little to no chance of breaking even. Arguments could be made for or against the profitability from speculation/long term holding, but that is beyond the scope of most people's definition of meaningful.
- driverdan 13y agoDespite DOGE mining difficulty shooting up this week it's still one of the most profitable coins to mine thanks to its spike in value. I've been making $60+ per day mining it. Now if I only had 10x as much hardware...
- kcbanner 13y agoWhat hardware are you currently running?
- driverdan 13y agoSeven 290x video cards between two systems. They're running lower than peak output due to not having enough power (nearly maxing a 20A breaker). Here's my custom dashboard I wrote to monitor it: http://driverdan.com:3000/ http://driverdan.com:3000/
- pbhjpbhj 13y ago>I've been making $60+ per day mining it. // So is that "I've been grossing $60+ per day mining it."? Also, you've converted that value from doge to bitcoin? Any idea what your costs are (hardware + running)?
- driverdan 13y agoYes, gross. Power is roughly 10% overhead. Exchange fees are something like 2%. Those are my only monetary costs right now. I go DOGE -> BTC -> USD.
- vbtemp 13y agoAre you part of a pool or flying solo?
- driverdan 13y agoPool (multipool). My hash rate isn't high enough to solo mine doge.
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoSo we need more than one distributed virtual currency? What property does this one have that is interesting beyond that?
- adrianwaj 13y agoThe reason why I think it's hot: because the cost-of-stake to purchase it is orders of magnitude cheaper than ltc or btc. I worked out that if 1 million coins were allocated to all 3 chain for their total coin target, $1000 would buy about 0.06 bitcoins, 0.59 litecoins and 5.55 doge. Or 1 million divided into each chains' coins already in existence: 0.10 vs 1.97 vs 15.83 respectively. So with doge, you get more bang for your buck, a larger slice of the pie for each $ spent. And a huge sub-reddit to launch into, and a clean piece of cyberspace to work with. That's pretty compelling to me just on its own. And the coin I feel is sovereign to bitcoin. Also, when you see kids drawing pictures of shibes, and women stripping naked for them (there's a subreddit for it,) you know you're onto something unique. The larger population need and want cryptos to work. Doge answers that need better than anything else right now. That's very important and should not be overlooked.
- crazydoggers 13y agoErrr... you just said that $1000 buys you .10, 1.97 and 15.83 (those numbers don't even make sense anyhow), which means that .10 bitcoins equals 15.83 dogecoins in value. So what difference does that make... I can still spend 0.0001 bitcoins or 0.01583 dogecoins which would each equal a $1 in value. There's no difference in "cost-of-stake" at all. Why do people have such trouble understanding fractions?
- adrianwaj 13y ago3 cakes with a million slices each. $1000 buys you 0.1 of a bitcoin slice, 1.97 litecoin slices and 15.83 doge slices. (that's according to a cake composed of the current # of coins in existence for each cake, not the target amount) So each piece of your cake costs $1000, but each piece takes out a different proportion from the whole cake (ie a certain number of slices per piece.) The thing to think about is that buying coins, building an app and launching into a reddit, would likely be better than buying a mining rig to mine. Even a single app will inspire other developers to do the same and both will increase the value of one's coins (ie the size of your piece grows, as does the cake.) It's like IPO'ing your app on release, it's your coin value that goes up. And that's hot. The cake value is determined by the richness of apps that are its ingredients - and the number of people that are circling it wanting a slice. At the moment, doge has few apps but many people circling it wanting the cake to grow. If you build an app that's any good, you've got immediate traction, and if you hold doge, that value will grow too. (just my theory anyway)
- hngiszmo 13y agoDoge in particular has no property apart from the name and the hype around the meme. There are more than 200 alt coins [1] and the vast majority of these don't contribute anything new to the field of crypto currencies but many succeed to win followers just because people keep calling the process that should be called "policing with a small compensation" "mining for profit". Read Satoshi's whitepaper[2]. Mining is meant to not be profitable for the masses and yet it is profitable in so many cases. Why is this? Because people are confused about the value of the minable goods. Mining is always connected with an up-front investment and the bigger the industry the more professional you have to be to do it profitably. Therefore loosers/scammers/lunatics/pump-and-dumpers (sorry) gravitate towards unprofessional coins where there is no professionalism celebrating the next big thing since bitcoin and once their coin of choice turns more mature they abandon ship as the very property they seek – easy minability – got lost. Disclaimer: I own bitcoins and was sent 100 reddit-dogetipbot-dogecoins. [1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134179.msg4701768 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134179.msg4701768 [2] http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
- SilasX 13y ago>Doge in particular has no property apart from the name and the hype around the meme. I think you're neglecting the value of the community. Dogecoin is, from a technical standpoint, just Bitcoin with some cosmetic changes, but the users make it much easier to get help and get involved. They're also more willing to give people dogecoin tips, which encourages spread.
- EA 13y agoDogecoin can't be a real thing one day? Those people probably said the same thing about a website called Mt. Gox: Magic The Gathering Online which went on to be the leader in BitCoin exchange.
- ii 13y agoOur PM is really into crypto-currencies and when we talk about dogecoins it always makes me smile and feel better. I don't own any dogecoin yet but they surely make me healthier and more productive!
- riffraff 13y agono dogecoin celebration shall be complete without looking at the scary graphs http://coinmarketcap.com/mineable.html http://coinmarketcap.com/mineable.html (I personally think it's a bubble but hey, it's growing while others falter)
- benguild 13y agoIs this seriously happening...
- xixi77 13y agoQuite honestly, shameless self-promotion of this is getting really tiresome.
- owenversteeg 13y agoI think the sense of community that’s there is the main reason for Dogecoin's popularity. In the Bitcoin community, scams are rampant and those that are scammed never get their money back. In the Dogecoin community, there is exactly the opposite. I ran a website called EasyDoge (http://easydoge.com http://easydoge.com) that was designed as an online wallet service. Unfortunately, it was hacked and quite a bit of money was stolen. I compensated everyone out of my own pocket for the losses. This isn’t a rare occurrence: the victims of two major hacks are being compensated by the SaveDogemas effort.
- judk 13y agoYou seem like an honest and caring person, but your post does nor increase my confidence in dogecoin-- it is being propped up by generous donors?