It is the fifth most-valuable cryptocurrency on the market, according to CoinMarketCap, having increased more than 6,000 per cent this year.
Unlike Bitcoin, which has set 21 million as the finite amount of the digital currency, Dogecoin has 129 billion coins in circulation and will continue to make new blocks of coins available to mine each year. That's part of the reason one Dogecoin is currently valued about 80 cents and a Bitcoin is worth about $80,000.
"Dogecoin is not so much an alternative deflationary numismatic instrument as it is an inflationary leisured exploration of community-building around a cryptoasset," wrote Usman Chohan, economist at the University of New South Wales Business School, in a paper updated in February about the digital currency.Dogecoin was created December 6, 2013, by a pair of software engineers as a joke.
The website nods to its joke origins at the very top: Its Shiba Inu mascot is the first image on the page, mimicking the meme that inspired it, which features the same dog surrounded by a bunch of Comic Sans text in broken English. But Elon Musk is the loudest and most prominent supporter of dogecoin. One of his bizarre tweets to his 50 million followers can send the crypto surging. That's what happened in April, when Musk tweeted "Doge Barking at the moon" and shared a photo of a painting by Spanish artist Joan Miró, which is titled "Dog Barking at the Moon."
Blur's hit Song 2 (WOO HOO) was written as a joke