What is actually Dogecoin? Why Elon Musk promotes this 'meme coin'?

Dogecoin, which started as a joke or an Internet parody based on a viral dog meme, has skyrocketed to 800% in the last 24 hours, according to Coinbase. Similar to bitcoin, Dogecoin is a digital coin that is mainly used for e-transactions and its meme has a picture of the Shiba Inu on it.

Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer are two engineers who thought of creating a payment system that is instant, fun and doesn't require you to the usual banking fees. They choose to create a cryptocurrency for making this vision come true and to make things more interesting and funny they featured the face of the Shia Inu dog from the popular 'Doge' meme and hence the name.

What it's worth?

It was launched on December 6, 2013, and today has a market capitalization of over $5 Billion. Yes, billion with a ‘B’. To give you some context, this is ‘coin’ is very popular amongst the meme community and they had various campaigns to increase the price of a Dogecoin. More specifically, in July 2020 the price of a Dogecoin astronomically reached a $1 thanks to the trend on TikTok which made people invest in it so it reaches that figure.

Elon Musk on Dogecoin

Tesla founder Elon Musk had previously tweeted about dogecoin and indicated in April 2019, that it was his “fav cryptocurrency.”

Recently, in January of 2021, It saw an increase of over 800% overnight as Elon Musk started tweeting about this coin as he is somewhat a meme fanatic.

Currency Supply

Dogecoin started its initial coin production schedule with 100 billion coins in circulation. By mid-2015 the 100 billionth Dogecoin had been mined with an additional 5 billion coins put into circulation every year thereafter. There is currently no implemented hard cap on the total supply of Dogecoins. Initially, Dogecoin had a supply limit of 100 billion coins, which would already have been far more coins than the top digital currencies were allowing. Nonetheless, in February 2014, Dogecoin founder Jackson Palmer announced that the limit would be removed to create a consistent reduction of its inflation-rate over time.

Speed

As mention earlier in the article the creator of the coin wanted to make sure it is fast and if you would compare the dogecoin with other industry-leading digital currency you'll find out that where a Bitcoin takes 10 minutes to complete a transaction dogecoin takes only 1 minute even faster than the Litecoin which takes 2.5 minutes block time.

Usage

Dogecoin as you already know is famous amongst the meme community and hence is been used as transaction service on Reddit and Twitter where you will find the meme community in big numbers.

Reddit users on the forum CryptoCurrency and SatoshiStreetBets discussions referenced the 'WallStreetBets’ efforts to squeeze out Wall Street shops from heavily shorted stocks and urged people to buy into Dogecoin.

Conclusion

In the end, I would like to say that this could very well be a facade and might just wear off by tomorrow so unless you are sure about it don't do anything or maybe just spend a little bit if you have some money lying around you never it might blow up.

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