Okay so my family group chat, the one that's usually just my mom sending recipe photos and my brother arguing about grill technique, turned into a crypto trading floor this week. My brother-in-law Dave sent a message at 11:47pm on Tuesday that just said "IM IN ON DOGE, ITS GOING TO THE MOON" with four rocket emojis, and by Wednesday morning there were something like forty unread messages about coin gains.
For anyone who's been offline: Dogecoin, the joke cryptocurrency with the Shiba Inu logo that started as a meme back in 2013, has been on an absurd run. It closed out this week bumping right up against $0.68, which if you'd told me that number back in February when it was sitting at like two cents I would have laughed you out of the room. Some of this is just crypto being crypto in 2021 (everything's up, Bitcoin's been bouncing around the high $50,000s the past couple weeks after its April peak), but a huge chunk of this particular spike is because Elon Musk is hosting Saturday Night Live this coming weekend and the internet has decided that's somehow a Dogecoin catalyst event. I don't fully understand the logic and I don't think anyone does, honestly.
Dave asked me Wednesday if he should put in $2,000. I told him no, obviously, the same way I'd tell him no if he asked whether he should put $2,000 on red at a roulette table, except at least at a casino somebody brings you a free drink. He did it anyway. I checked back in Thursday and he was up 30%, texted me a screenshot with no caption, just the number in green. I'm happy for him, genuinely, but I also think this is exactly how these stories always start right before they don't end well.
What actually annoyed me more than the doge stuff was trying to check my own boring index fund balance on my phone Tuesday night and having the app just spin and spin and eventually time out. Not naming names, but if your trading app can't handle a Tuesday night traffic spike in 2021, that's a you problem, not an internet problem. I closed the app and went to bed, which in hindsight was probably the healthiest possible response to the whole week.
In a completely different corner of the tech world, there's a federal courtroom in Oakland where Epic Games and Apple have been going at it since Monday, and it's been more entertaining than I expected. Tim Sweeney's been on the stand for hours getting cross-examined about Fortnite's in-game currency and why exactly Epic thought it was fine to sneak a direct payment option past App Store review back in August. I've read a couple of the transcript excerpts going around and there's something very funny about watching a multi-billion dollar dispute get argued down to the level of "well what does 'reasonable' mean, exactly." I don't have a strong horse in this race. I think Apple's 30% cut is too high for a lot of small developers, and I also think Epic picked this fight for their own commercial reasons more than out of some principled stand about the open web. Both of those things can be true at once. That trial's got a couple more weeks to run, so I'm sure I'll have more to say once there's an actual ruling instead of just testimony about V-Bucks pricing tiers.
Weird week. Between doge screenshots and antitrust testimony I've barely thought about anything else, which is maybe not the healthiest sign but here we are.
Going to go check if Dave's still up 30%.