Dogecoin's Two Birthdays
How the unique fusion of Meme, Coin and Community created something truly special.
Hey all, GoodShibe here!
There’s really only one way to start a post like this:
Holy freaking moly: 10 years! Has it really been that long?!
Pretty wild to think that in ten years we’ve gone from a few handfuls of coins to a full-blown Cryptosphere!
(Coinmarketcap.com now says “2M+” when trying to put an actual number on it.)
Not to mention the idea that our silly little Shiba-based-coin has legitimately come into its own inside of this crazy, crypto space.
I know that there are more than a few people out there who are truly surprised that we’ve made it this far, but, for those of us who’ve been here since the beginning, there’s really no mystery to our coin’s success:
You see, Dogecoin was born of laughter.
This here’s the joke that set the stage. A wry joke, sure, one meant to poke fun at Bitcoin and all of the craziness surrounding it. But jokes are funny that way: once they’re out and in the wild there’s simply no controlling them.
And this joke - all slap-dashed together by Billy and Jackson, unleashed as a crypto-coin - well, it hit the web and people, from all over the world, took notice; yet not as some Bitcoin parody clone. No, people looked out at that silly Shiba Inu and saw a beacon — a fun, warm and friendly welcome into a cold and technical space.
So, yes, those of us who found the coin may not have gotten the joke as intended but we took it and ran with it all the same.
And now, a full decade later, Dogecoin continues to thrive thanks to the efforts of an uncountable, international group of communities who’ve made it their personal passion project.
Today our little coin that could turns 10 and, frankly, I couldn’t be happier.
Especially since we get to have two cakes!
You see, one of our neat little quirks is that Dogecoin really has two birthdays:
On December 6th, 2013, Dogecoin’s genesis block was minted and that created the coin that we know and love but it was on December 8th, when DOGE was first announced on BitcoinTalk, that things really went insane.
(Day one)
The nascent Dogecoin community exploded outward from that point, a digital big bang that birthed a swirling mass of silliness, commerce and creation. I know it sounds like I’m being hyperbolic but there’s really no other way to describe it; the amount of immediate enthusiasm for the coin, to this day, just utterly boggles my mind.
And, yet, looking back on it, maybe inside of all of that chaos there are some simple explanations for what helped to ignite the spark that lit the fuse.
I mean, over and above our spiffy, original logo, of course.
The biggest explanation for how things blew up, in my opinion, was access.
Because the first version of Dogecoin had spun off from Luckycoin, meaning that Dogecoin’s mining rewards were random - the first 100,000 blocks offering up to 1 million coins per block - everyone had a real chance of earning a ton of coins, no matter how crappy your CPU or GPU was.
A neat side-effect of this distribution system meant that Dogecoins were not only stupidly easy to acquire, they were pretty decently distributed and, very quickly, everywhere.
Anyone could get Dogecoins, quickly, easily and it was all so new! People just couldn’t wait to talk about their good fortunes and, importantly, wanted to share their newfound riches with others.
Yes, sure, the coins were almost worthless but it didn’t matter, almost worthless was good enough.
That original Bitcointalk thread immediately spun outward into the first Dogecoin forum Doges.org and Reddit.com/r/Dogecoin (where I landed), both launching on that very same day.
And the original logo very quickly got an overhaul into something much more fancy.
Here are a few others that I love from around that time (and a bit later)
Dogecoin.com, originally launched by Jackson Palmer on December 3rd, 2013 with the message:
“dogecoin is an open source peer-to-peer parody cryptocurrency.
actually want to make dogecoin a thing? hit me up.”
very quickly found itself changing to meet the flood of interest.
By December 10th, Jackson had an official Dogecoin T-Shirt up for sale.
Tom and Gary immediately began accepting Dogecoins for their Decentralized Dance Party! (Hi Gary!)
And the Scammers forum on Doges.org was already three pages deep.
By December 15th, when DogeTipBot went live on Reddit, newly-minted ‘Shibes’ were already well into launching a Dogestarter forum to fund new projects, discussing the best GPUs and pools to mine their own coins and launching faucets.
By December 18th, the community celebrated (at the time - oh, boy, did that enthusiasm ever shift) as Cryptsy.com decided to list Dogecoin. (Coinedup.com had added a DOGE/BTC pair back on the 12th).
And that’s not even the half of it. Seriously, I’m just starting to scratch the surface.
For those of us who were around during those first few weeks, the complete and utter whirlwind of it all was truly a sight to behold.
I was primarily on /r/Dogecoin and for almost two solid weeks I barely slept; just waves and waves of messages and memes and content - unfettered creativity - rolling through the subreddit. It got so bad, posts were sinking beneath the waves so quickly, that many of us were hanging out in the ‘New’ section of the sub just to try and catch and upvote cool content before it could break and sink below the surface.
Unfortunately, so much of those early days have been lost to time. I’m always digging around for more though and if you have memories or memes or anything cool from that time that you’d like to share, I’d really love to see them!
Over the next couple of months, the early Shibes of Dogecoin would go on to do some truly wild things together - from banding together to help Save Dogemas for our fledgling community to helping to send the Jamaican Bobsled Team to the Sochi Olympics to… well, there’s a lot of ground to cover there and, really, those are topics for future posts.
Which I will be writing about over the next while.
My goal for this space and my overall efforts now that I’ve been back in the Dogecoin community for a while, well, I’ve got an idea but it’s kind of insane and, frankly, likely to blow up in my face.
Luckily, that’s just about entirely my kind of flavor.
The inspiration for this thing came from one simple question that arose as I looked back over these last 10 years:
What if we took all of the hard won lessons learned over the last 10 years and… learned from them?
Because if there’s one thing I’m always hearing, from new Shibes and old, it’s this wistful nostalgia and a desire for things to be more fun.
Knowing that we cannot change the past, what if we took all that we’ve learned and baked it into the crust of something new, inspired by what came before?
I want to build a Dogecoin Renaissance.
Does that sound interesting to you? I literally can’t sleep at night, that’s how excited I am about this.
Again, I have no freaking idea if it’ll work.
And I make absolutely zero promises, I am, after all, only one Shibe.
But I have a North star now and in this space I will be, amongst other things, looking back on my personal experiences within the Reddit Dogecoin community, 10 years later. Reflecting what I have or, perhaps, should have learned.
Because I certainly know that I’ve made mistakes along the way.
I’ve also come to learn a lot about myself over this last decade - including, crucially, how to monitor and care for my mental health in a ridiculously volatile space.
In short: there’s lots of ground to cover and I encourage you to pop by, say hi and if you’re comfortable, share your stories and perspectives, too.
And let’s try to build something new, together!
Much Love,
GoodShibe
PS: I’ve dug up and put together a small collection of early Dogecoin community videos from the archives. I hope you’ll enjoy them as much as I do!
PPS: Finally, if you’d like to tip and help support my work you can send Dogecoin to:
Amazing work! Keep it up!
Thanks for writing this!