Dogecoin (Doge)
Dogecoin is an open-source peer-to-peer currency that was created by Billy Markus, a Portland programmer. Dogecoin is based on one of the Internet's most famous dog memes, Doge.
The crypto was cloned from bitcoin but the clone included a few adjustments -- a faster block time, the total number of coins to be released, the hardware needed to mine, and the code was written in the Comic Sans typeface.
There are currently nearly 100 billion Dogecoin in circulation out there because there is no transaction limit put on the coin. The creators intended to come up with a fast, light, cheap and easy to use coin than Bitcoin at that time, which was also faced by a shady past and scandals. Many people came to use it for those benefits.
It has a very large fanbase. Shibes (Shiba Inus), which is the community that mostly use the crypto, mainly use it for tipping online, for instance to people who share great content – just the same way you would upvote or like their content. It is anonymous, decentralized and secure. You can use it to pay for goods and services or trade it with other traditional currencies such as US dollars and Euros.
Dogecoin uses a Proof of Work algorithm.
Some history
Dogecoin, or the Doge, was first conceived in 2013 by a Sydney, Australia-based graphic designer or marketer by the name Jackson Palmer who worked as a marketer for Business Catalyst product at Adobe Systems Inc.
Fascinated about Bitcoin and without the coin being existent, he jokingly twitted that Dogecoin would be the crypto of the future and called people to invest in it. He Photoshopped what the coin would look like and bought the domain dogecoin.com. Encouraged to turn it into reality by a student called Ben Atkin from Front Range Community College who tweeted to devs to help Palmer, Palmer consulted a friend Potland Oregon-based dev Billy Markus to help him and four days later, they had a working mining client in Windows and Mac and a wallet app.
The crypto shot to a $134 million USD in value in just a month, surpassing Bitcoin in value and popularity. After the one month, it became the third most valuable altcoin with a market cap of 53 million dollars.
Historically, the team has done quite some pretty work including helping raise funds to send athletes to Olympics and dug a well in Kenya.
The coin has had its share of a shady past, though, with a hack in 2014 leading to $12,000 worth of dogecoins stolen in 2013. Later on, the community threatened to leave because of the problems that surrounded the coin, prompting the company to merge-mine with Litecoin, and that gave it a better new day.
By March this year, the platform could handle a minimum of $50,000 and more than $200,000 per day in transactions, although many people had already left the coin. It is still a promising coin even after its shady past.
Benefits of Doge compared over other cryptos
For those asking whether Dogecoin is better than other cryptos, Doge gives you low transaction fees deal than the Bitcoin because it has low inflation. It is faster to accomplish transactions – even to a rate of more than 9 times as many transactions as possible in Bitcoin, within a period of 10 minutes; and 2 times more transactions than Litecoin in 2 and half minutes.
Doge also affords users a faster transaction confirmation time at the rate of a block per minute compared to one block in 2 and half minutes for Litecoin and a block in 10 minutes for Bitcoin. Faster confirmation time reduces the chances of double spending attacks on the network.
However, because Scrypt is memory intense and so the hardware is about 1000 times slower than SHA256, Doge has a very slow network speed with a hashrate of 6.68 TH/s compared to 6,680 TH/s. It is also a well-established coin than many of the new cryptos being launched today and has stood the test of time. It also has a huge community backing.
It is supported by GoCoin and Coin Payment, which are payment processors.
It is also possible to sell thousands of Doge and not crash the market (high liquidity) so it is great for traders seeking arbitrage opportunities between exchanges.
Mining the Doge
The easiest, cheapest and best way to mine Doge is Eobot, which uses Cloud Mining (www.eobot.com/cloud). You can also use any CPU or GPU for any coin, SHA-256 or Scrypt. For instance, using WeUseCoin tools with a CPU, click the MineWithCPU.bat file from the “Mine Dogecoins with CPU” folder. It is not very effective because it takes long before you get a share. With a GPU, it takes minutes with many GPU graphic cards.
You can use Dogecoin Wallet with a smartphone also or directly on the website. You use a private security key to access the full features of the wallet.
