What is Dogecoin (DOGE)?

Dogecoin (abbreviated ISO 4217: DOGE, symbol: Ð and D) is an open source peer-to-peer cryptocurrency created initially as a "joke coin" on December 6, 2013, rapidly developing its own online community, reaching a capitalization of US $ 60 million in January 2014. The currency uses as a "mascot / logo" the meme "Doge", a Shiba Inu dog.

History

Dogecoin was created by programmers Billy Markus, and Jackson Palmer, who hoped to create a fun cryptocurrency that could reach a wider audience than Bitcoin. In addition, he wanted to distance himself from the controversial history of other cryptocurrencies. After receiving several mentions on Twitter, Palmer bought the dogecoin.com domain and added a splash screen, which showed the coin's logo and the text written in Comic Sans. Markus saw the website linked to an IRC chat room and started creating the currency after arriving in Palmer. Markus based Dogecoin on an existing cryptocurrency, Luckycoin, which features a random reward that is received for mining a block, although this behavior was later changed to a static block reward in March 2014. The original idea for the network of Dogecoin was to produce a total of 100 billion Dogecoins, but it was later announced that the chain would produce an unlimited amount of Dogecoins.

Supply

Unlike deflationary cryptocurrencies that have a limit on the number of coins that can be produced, there is no limit to how many Dogecoins can be produced, which makes it an inflationary currency. Dogecoin was initially to have a limit of 100 billion coins, which would have been far more coins than the major digital currencies were allowing. In February 2014, Dogecoin founder Jackson Palmer announced that this limit would be removed and that there would be no upper limit, which should have resulted from a steady reduction in its inflation rate over a long period of time.