We all enjoy that deep laughter that comes with our favourite memes. These moments are truly priceless, but put a meme on the blockchain, issue some coins and boom that meme now has a price and a market cap. On 05/05/2021 Dogecoin, the biggest meme in crypto, was worth $85bn, with other memes like Shiba Inu also having billion dollar market caps.
Market caps at All Time High prices:
Dogecoin: $85bn
Shiba Inu: $13.8bn
DogeElon: $1.1bn
Doge originally started as a joke to mock the hype around bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in 2013. Funnily enough, one of the creators of Dogecoin, Jackson Palmer, still maintains that dogecoin and other cryptocurrencies lack inherent value and are ponzi schemes. In the tweet storm below, Palmer actually puts together a well articulated argument against cryptocurrencies, claiming they are a…
“hyper-capitalistic technology built primarily to amplify the wealth of its proponents through a combination of tax avoidance, diminished regulatory oversight and artificially enforced scarcity […] which perpetuates a cult-like “get rich quick” funnel”.
You can see his full critique here:
https://twitter.com/ummjackson/status/1415353984617914370?s=20
Many crypto enthusiasts claim that Jackson Palmer is simply bitter because he sold all of his personal dogecoins too early. They go on to say that he is putting out all this FUD around crypto as a coping mechanism in relation to his lost fortune. However, it seems pretty clear that his views on crypto extend well beyond the blockchain and are more centred on capitalism.
The crypto community have well and truly embraced the joke behind the coin. They have even flipped the joke and now see doge as the ultimate mockery of normal fiat currencies with the idea being that money isn’t what the government says it is, but money is simply whatever the people decide it is. Therefore if the people say that a coin with a dog on the face of it has monetary value, then so be it.
The rebellion at the heart of the dogecoin community is interesting because it looks like they are trying to change who decides what “money” is. According to Google, money is defined as “any item or verifiable record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services”. Historically, whatever currency we use is typically accepted because the government has deemed it acceptable as currency. Now that cryptocurrencies enable the function of money without the government or central banks having to verify it, it seems like the crypto community is trying to make this point heard by pushing the most audacious coin possible to be accepted as currency.
The popularity of dogecoin has no doubt been helped by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, endorsing the coin — it’s almost reached the point where you can’t discuss Doge without mentioning Elon. After all of Elon’s “Doge to the moon” tweets it would be easy to confuse this billionaire’s twitter account with one of the many anonymous accounts on twitter that shamelessly promote their favourite coins. Amidst all of Elon’s antics, the price of Dogecoin soared by more than 15,000% this year, to reach an all time high of $0.76. Elsewhere, other big names like the NBA team Dallas Mavericks (who are owned by another billionaire crypto enthusiast, Mark Cuban) backed the meme coin by announcing that they will accept Dogecoin as a form of payment.
In the B-word Conference¹, Jack Dorsey (Twitter CEO), Catherine Wood (CEO of Ark Invest — a $50bn dollar investment fund) and Elon Musk (CEO of Tesla) — sat down and discussed the future of cryptocurrencies — Elon Musk mentioned that he believes “the most ironic and entertaining outcome is the most likely outcome”. How ironic that a project built with the sole intention of mocking bitcoin and the entire crypto ecosystem ended up being one of the biggest drivers of crypto mass adoption?
