So my buddy Dave sent me a link on Tuesday to something called "Dogecoin" and my first reaction was that he'd finally lost it. It's a cryptocurrency. With a Shiba Inu on the logo. The whole site is written in the Comic Sans meme voice, "such coin, much wow," that sort of thing. Some programmer out in Portland, a guy named Billy Markus, apparently knocked it together earlier this month as a joke and put it out there on December 6th. And now people are actually mining it and trading it like it's a real thing, which I guess by December 2013 standards it basically is.
I want to be annoyed by this. Part of me is annoyed by this. But I've also had it open in a tab for three days now watching the numbers move, so make of that what you will.
Here's the thing though, this whole month has been unhinged for crypto in general, and Dogecoin is honestly just the punchline to a story that's been getting less funny by the week. Bitcoin was sitting north of $1,200 at the end of November. I remember because I was half-seriously doing math on whether I should've kept mining on my old GPU rig back in 2011 instead of selling the cards off (I didn't, and I regret it, and yes I'm still bitter about it two years later). Then China's central bank came out on December 5th and told banks and payment processors they weren't allowed to touch Bitcoin transactions anymore, and the price just fell out of bed. It's been sliding ever since, down into the $600s the last time I checked tonight, which is a pretty brutal haircut in under a month.
The best part of the whole crash, and I mean this sincerely, is that it produced one of the funniest things I've read on the internet all year. On December 18th, in the middle of the worst of the selloff, somebody on the Bitcointalk forums posted a message titled "I AM HODLING IN THIS MOFO," clearly several drinks in, explaining in a fairly chaotic wall of text why he wasn't selling his coins even as the price tanked. He misspelled "holding." Nobody corrected it. By the next day half the forum was using "HODL" unironically as their whole investment philosophy. I don't know why that delights me as much as it does but it really does. There's something very true about the internet in that one typo becoming a permanent part of the vocabulary faster than any actual news story this month.
Anyway, back to Dogecoin. My actual opinion, since apparently I have one now: it's dumb, it's clearly not going anywhere as a serious currency, and I still kind of love it. Bitcoin by December has gotten so self-serious, all libertarian manifestos and "the banks are doomed" posturing, that a coin whose entire premise is a picture of a dog looking mildly concerned feels like a relief. It doesn't pretend to be anything. Nobody's writing thinkpieces about Dogecoin replacing the Fed. It's just people on Reddit tipping each other fractions of a coin for good comments, which, fine, that's actually kind of a nice use of the internet compared to most of what December's given us.
I'm not buying any, to be clear. I don't need a second thing in my life whose value I refresh compulsively at midnight (Bitcoin already fills that role, badly). But I'll admit the whole saga this month, the China ban, the crash, the HODL guy, and now a meme coin riding in on the wreckage, has been more entertaining to watch than basically anything else in tech this December. Everyone's been locked into the Target breach story and the NSA rulings, which, sure, those matter a lot more in the grand scheme. But there's something about watching an entire subculture invent its own vocabulary out of a typo in real time that I don't think I'll get tired of thinking about, even after the price charts stop being interesting.
If Dogecoin is still around by summer I'll eat my words. I doubt it will be. I've been wrong about internet jokes before though.