![]() He later talked up his cryptocurrency portfolio on Twitter. 19, rapper Soulja Boy-most recently known for his involvement in the Fyre Festival debacle-was paid by an unknown party to record a Cameo video advertisement for Dogecoin. When the Reddit forum /r/wallstreetbets successfully drove stock in GameStop to all-time highs in mid-January, cryptocurrency pumpers saw the audience they’d been hoping to see for a long time: people who didn’t understand what they were doing and who would put in their own money thinking they were striking a blow against the big guys, while “having fun” doing so. The recent bitcoin price rise was, for a long while, curiously lacking in ordinary retail trading volume, until the numbers were high enough to attract press headlines and make the public think something real was going on there. “Pump and dump” rings have been around since these digital coins could first be traded for money. So manipulation and price-pumping are endemic. The markets are thinly traded, and regulators are all but absent. In the cryptocurrency trading markets, dogecoin was just another altcoin: a low-volume, near-worthless token that gamblers and day traders could swap for other cryptocurrencies, in the hope of making a few pennies.Ĭryptocurrencies aren’t useful for anything except trading. Work stopped on the Dogecoin code the software was barely even maintained. The remaining Dogecoin community recovered-though the founders had long since been driven away-and continued playing with their coin, unnoticed by the world. ![]() As well as a serial scammer, Kennedy turned out to be a serial rapist he was convicted in May 2016 of three counts of rape, and jailed for 11 years. It came out that he was actually serial scammer Ryan Kennedy, who had a long history of creating scam start-ups that raised funds and vanished. Moolah shut down in October 2014, and Green disappeared with the money. ![]() He threatened to sue the original Dogecoin founders for harassment, for questioning his use of /r/dogecoin in this way. Green started selling shares in Moolah on /r/dogecoin. ![]() Most /r/dogecoin users tipped single dogecoins, worth a fraction of a penny-but Green gave tips of thousands of dollars. He set up a cryptocurrency exchange in the United Kingdom called Moolah, to handle dogecoins as well as other cryptocurrencies. So the shibes started dreaming of getting rich for free-and the hucksters moved in.Ī fellow called Alex Green joined Dogecoin. They did this just by creating their own magical internet money, selling it for bitcoins, then selling the bitcoins for dollars-which was surprisingly feasible at the height of a bubble.īut even fun money is money, and a toy cryptocurrency can be turned into real money the supply of gullibility is deep, if not infinite. Doge4Water raised $32,000 to supply clean water in Kenya. They raised nearly $30,000 of dogecoins in January 2014 to send the Jamaican bobsled team to the 2014 Winter Olympics. If I’d just held, I could have made a whole dollar earlier this week.) (For full disclosure, I owned six dogecoins-which I did not pay for-in 2014, though they were deleted when I reformatted my laptop and couldn’t be bothered moving the coins over. They would tip each other dogecoins for amusing comments. Dogecoin fans (nicknamed “shibes”) gathered on the Reddit forum /r/dogecoin. The idea was to have fun and be silly with a cryptocurrency that was cheap enough to mess around with-each coin was worth a fraction of a cent. Dogecoin started in December 2013, at the peak of the first big bitcoin bubble.ĭogecoin was originally a joke cryptocurrency, taking its name from the “doge” internet meme: a picture of a shiba inu dog talking in Comic Sans font. Dogecoin (pronounced “dozhe-coin”) was a slightly tweaked copy of Litecoin, which was a slightly tweaked copy of Bitcoin. In the early 2010s “altcoin” scene, lots of Bitcoin fans created their own magical internet money, so they too could get rich for free: copy the Bitcoin software, change a few details, and launch a new coin that you could trade for bitcoins. Other cryptocurrencies have come along for the ride, and one of the odder beneficiaries has been Dogecoin-heavily promoted on Twitter in the past couple of weeks by Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Bitcoin is going through another massive price pump, rising from $19,000 in December 2020 to just over $48,000 earlier this week.
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