The contemporary times are strange. A dog which stops its owner’s kissing attempts becomes a world-famous thing, a meme - Doge. Fair enough, many people love dogs; and Shiba Inu’s spirited personality, small upright ears, and cat-like agility give the breed a characteristic charm.
While Doge continues to multiply on the Internet, a new financial technology is gradually holding root. Cryptocurrency – based on a technology called public blockchain – is the form of pioneer Bitcoin is released into the world.
Bitcoin has been designed with the express purpose of being decentralised and thus not under the control of any central bank. Bitcoin has seen huge unbelievable profits and likewise massive declines also.
The gold rush of cryptocurrencies led to a proliferation of imitations. Most of these imitations were created with the express intention of being a bonafide currency, just like Bitcoin.
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However, there was another class of cryptocurrencies which only had the purpose of parodying the phenomena of cryptocurrencies. The creators of these meant these to be just for a few laughs.
In November 2013, a product manager at Adobe named Jackson Palmer tweeted a made-up currency called Dogecoin. Yes, cryptocurrency technology plus the Doge meme equals Dogecoin.
Dogecoin is not a share or stock of a company.
The joke was especially attractive to novice traders as its ticket price was low as compared to the established ones like Bitcoin. The community of Dogecoin investors and traders made a thriving ecosystem, though still much less than Bitcoin, and attracted a con artist who swindled around $2 to $4 million, and this heavily downscaled the activity in Dogecoin.
However, things began to look up big-time for Dogecoin when Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies began their upmove, and small participants were looking for a lower ticket price cryptocurrency.
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Also, being smaller capitalised would have enabled a higher percentage gain in the lesser ticket price ones like Dogecoin.
Then came Elon Musk and referring himself to as the Dogefather in a Saturday Night Live sketch and before that his tweets regarding this cryptocurrency. What investors and traders might end up doing is hurting themselves following the charm of a visionary businessman and their greed and fear of missing out (FOMO).