CRYPTOCURRENCY
Much Wow
I was wrong. Doge is so crypto.
By Hogefather, aka Jesse J Rogers
If you missed out on the Doge mania or feel silly for dumping your bag at four cents, you’re not alone. In the corners of the internet that I frequent, there are quite a lot of salty tears being spilled right now by could-have-been-millionaires.
Because I never got into Doge, I am to some degree among them. So yes. Much tears.
All those “serious” projects with “real use cases” that I’ve been holding on to lately have done okay but haven’t gone anywhere near the moon. None of them have catapulted from $0.005 in January to $0.30 now, only four and a half months later. And yet this joke from 7 years ago— this thing really did launch? 60x returns?
Will it do it again? Which crypto will be next? Let’s examine Doge with a fresh set of eyes and try to make sense of why this happened in the first place.
How Did This Happen?
Disclaimer: Nothing I say here is financial advice, this is for entertainment and educational purposes only. Consult a professional financial advisor.
By the way, that financial advisor you get will look very smart in a suit and tie or classy dress, they’ll scoff at things like Doge, and if you’re lucky maybe they’ll triple your money in 10 years.
Look, if you don’t want to get left behind by the technological revolutions sweeping through the world as you knew it, then you have to do your own research. The truth is that the establishment just can’t keep up with what’s happening. The trusted authorities are constantly getting blindsided by things that “can’t happen”. And yet they do happen.
The only solution is to really do your own research and trust in your own judgment, so that’s what I’ve been doing.
Because of that, Doge’s blast off didn’t completely surprise me. I got things very wrong by not buying a ton of it in January and February, due to its inflationary nature. But I at least saw it coming.
Oh… how inflationary, you ask?
There’s now a deflationary coin called Hoge that I think will take much less than 7 years to reach Doge prices, simply because the path is already so clearly laid out, and many who started in Doge have also bought into Hoge. Hoge also has a lot of options and capabilities since it is fresh and part of the Ethereum ecosystem, where all the DeFi action and multimillion-dollar digital art is. Hoge artists can soon use a new NFT mint to automatically get royalties on every sale using smart contracts.
But this article is about Doge, so you can read here or here if you want to know more about Hoge.
Back to the issue at hand, to answer the question of how this happened we have to explore the use case for Doge.
As a copy of a copy of a copy of Bitcoin, Doge doesn’t have a revolutionary, innovative technical solution to any particular problem. Despite its inflationary supply which implies an attempt to replace cash, Doge won’t be able to deliver on the holy grail medium-of-exchange-for-daily-transactions use case. It won’t replace cash. No more so than Bitcoin tried and failed to achieve.
But with a $40 billion market cap, it does appear that Doge is starting to become another store of value. “Digital gold” minted with a dog face instead of a B.
Though still tiny compared to Bitcoin, perhaps this competition in part accounts for the 11% drop in BTC price over the past 24 hours.
This fall in BTC is part of why so many people hate Doge. Detractors with an engineering perspective are often brutally critical because they think Doge makes a mockery of “real” projects. After all, Bitcoin maximalists will note, copies of Bitcoin can weigh it down by making it seem less scarce. It plants the idea in people’s minds that if Bitcoin is infinitely replicable, maybe it can’t be worth so much.
But people with a marketing perspective understand that the remaining barriers to crypto adoption are mostly no longer technical. The next-gen tech is already leaps and bounds better than the banking system. Again, DeFi offers possibilities that will change everything. Algorand already powers the currency for the Marshall Islands and could well become a global standard.
The PR challenges are the real problem. Crypto still has a bad reputation both because of earlier growing pains and because it feels too intimidating and unapproachable for most people.
“Right, a bad reputation… and Doge makes it even worse!” the critics will object.
The market disagrees. The sort of people who make that claim might be able to breeze through the acronyms and computer science models needed to understand 30-page project white papers, but the other 99% of the population would rather just gamble a few bucks on lotto tickets and hope for the best.
That’s why Doge is so big and “worthier” projects struggle for attention. The enthusiasts of these efficiency-solution type coins are making the mistake of thinking that the rest of the population has enough time, energy, and interest to dive deep into understanding this world. Most folks simply don’t. Suzie has to get dinner ready and there are screaming kids demanding her attention. Chuck is exhausted from pulling a double shift and just wants to spend his Saturday peacefully fishing on the boat. They’re just not going to read white papers. But they do have money. And they will laugh at a funny meme, and throw .
And that’s why I’ve become so bullish on meme coins like Doge and Hoge. They’re fun and relateable. Frankly, that’s all you need. Don’t overthink it. Just loosen up and ride the wave. As they cash out profits, new investors will take a look at other projects, but you need meme coins to initially draw people into an ecosystem that can benefit them greatly.
For more stories like this, follow me at @hogefather on Twitter.
