Most Expensive Tweet Ever Sends $11,000 To Kenyan Water Charity Via Dogecoin
forbes.comDogecoin is interesting. On one hand, it's all an elaborate joke and everyone involved knows it. On the other hand, it's got a higher transaction volume than its 'serious' cousin Bitcoin, and people occasionally use it to transfer significant amounts of money (e.g. here, and the Jamaican Bobsled Team).
The biggest problem a currency has to overcome is the network effect. It's damned hard to bootstrap a currency, to get people to start -- and continue -- to use it instead of some other currency. With conventional currencies, that's typically done by governments requiring taxes to be paid in it. This has the effect of basically guaranteeing that everyone also receives their income in it as well and makes it difficult for another currency to sneak in. Taxes basically anchor the national economy onto the national currency.
With crypto-currencies, that's not an option since there's no government to levy taxes. But Bitcoin did something similar through vices: the Silk Road and Satoshi Dice got people using Bitcoin and money into the economy because they wanted to use it for drug trafficking and gambling. Because both of those sites only accepted Bitcoin, and they're either illegal or highly restricted in the normal economy, they acted as an anchor to convince people to adopt Bitcoin and move money into and out of its economy. Once bootstrapped, it's now being used for other, more legitimate, purposes.
Dogecoin is bootstrapping itself in a different way, through indiscriminate tipping and charity. It's using this kind of frivolous spending as a way of getting its transaction volume up and bootstrapping exchanges between Dogecoin and Bitcoin and USD. I could see it moving up to micro-transactions of some kind -- something small, perhaps still a joke of some kind, but for transactions (i.e, receiving something in return) rather than donation. Who knows, maybe one day we all woke up, and without realizing it Dogecoin has gone from a joke, to a joke people use for real stuff around the edges, to a real currency with a joke around the edges?
This is a very misleading comment. Dogecoin only processes about 0.3 percent of what Bitcoin handles daily, and is far behind in total number of daily transactions:
well for one that site's data is off. claims DOGE confirmation time is ~30mins. click through to the chart. shows confirmation times hovering around 1 minute. reward per block shown ~40k. way off. each block currently rewards 250k: visit http://dogechain.info/chain/DogeCoin and subtract subsequent outstanding amounts. 250k difference. those are just the ones i noticed immediately, i'm sure other data is wrong there too.
That link is incorrect. That data is on the wrong fork. Dogecoin is on 1.6, that is on 1.5(Dogecoin had a hard fork yesterday, the site hasn't updated the fork).
If you look at the actual data, Dogecoin is at 101.2% of it's daily volume, and if you go in $USD value, it is slightly over triple Bitcoins daily $USD trading.
Ah, thanks, good point. Sorry, for that part I just went by what the linked article said about Dogecoin. :(
That guys data is wrong. The link he gave you is on the 1.5 fork, while Dogecoin is on the 1.6 fork. If you look at data from the 1.6 fork, Dogecoin is passing 100% of its net value in daily transactions. The article is right, his info is wrong(since the fork was only yesterday. That site has not updated yet).
the site he/she quoted has bad data, at least to some degree. see my reply.
As a Keynesian I love that Dogecoin is the first (that I know of) crypto currency that isn't deflationary. I do wish there was a way to make the things other than mining though. I hate "mining". Such a waste of resources.
"Mining" is really solving a block. This means that your computer has verified all the transactions in the block and signed them. As a reward for keeping the transaction record secure, you get some coins. At first, the reward has to be large, to entice people to a new cryptocurrency. But over time, a secure network becomes valuable for itself, and the reward isn't necessary anymore.
> "Mining" is really solving a block.
Well.. kind of.
Mining is really thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands of people competing to try to solve the same block. The one machine to solve it first gets the reward. (or if in a pool, it's given to the pool.) Over and over again- in the case of dogecoin, once every minute or so. The GP's statement about it being a massive waste of resources is unfortunately true - that's a lot of electricity for any popular coin.
> But over time, a secure network becomes valuable for itself, and the reward isn't necessary anymore.
Has this actually happened in any case? Logically if there is no value to be gained from maintaining the secure network (eg, 'mining' new transactions into blocks for confirmation), then many fewer people will do so. The fact that it's a secure network is great - but it doesn't seem enough to entice a critical mass of people to maintain it at a cost to themselves.
Even if you ignore the problem of getting a critical mass, this is an issue!
Imagine operating the network as a public good and agreeing to minimise the resources spent on it. That still doesn't prevent one of the players from secretly increasing their computing power then suddenly taking full control of the network and disrupting other countries' economies.
The incentives means you don't have to trust anyone else - you'll keep improving your CPU power because it makes economic sense to do so.
There is some monetary value, in transaction fees, that are collected even if there is no block reward. There will be fewer people, but hopefully it will still be above critical mass. It really doesn't take much, even a few hundred people running low-power ASICs will do just fine. We will see something similar with Doge soon. In 2015, the payout will be fixed at 5% of what it was last month. Maybe everyone will stop mining, and maybe they won't.
> It really doesn't take much, even a few hundred people running low-power ASICs will do just fine.
That won't work - it will enable easy fraud since anyone with a moderate amount of computing power can fake the block chain.
You need a lot of computing power - but without large rewards people won't be willing to do it.
I don't expect any crypto currency to survive unchanged past the no-more-coins date. Instead I expect the date to be extended to forever.
There's a good possibility that is still pretty optimistic.
I'm aware of what mining is. And you're not just signing a block. No one would be making custom ASICs and putting server farms near hydro-electric plants if all you had to do was sign a block. You're paying people to do useless work and it's silly.
You lose resources to create paper currencies, I don't see how two things are different
Because you lose far more with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is currently doing as many transactions as a small community credit union, but it's got server farms all over the world and thousands of individual computers and ASICs running 24/7 to "secure" it. It's totally out of control.
How else would you propose securing the network?
Proof of stake. Or figure out something totally new. I'm not proposing a solution, just the problem. My gut tells me there is a solution though.
The primary function of mining is not creation of coins, but security of the network. Mining is the reward to make sure enough people do it that transactions don't become exploitable.
You definitely don't need to be a Keynesian to believe that a bit of monetary inflation is a positive thing. It's quite likely that Dogecoin will still be very deflationary if the velocity of cash flow, transaction volume increase faster than the Ð5 billion/a being added annually. Not to mention lost private keys which essentially destroy related coins forever.
You definitely don't need to be a Keynesian to believe that a bit of monetary inflation is a positive thing.
In fact, Dogecoin's model is a real world implementation of Milton Friedman's proposal:
“We don’t need a Fed,” Milton Friedman says, twirling a letter opener as he speaks. “I have, for many years, been in favor of replacing the Fed with a computer,” he adds. Each year, it “would print out a specified number of paper dollars” to augment the money supply. “Same number, month after month, week after week, year after year.”
One of the forms of wealth accumulation that's taken off in the Dogecoin community is tipping - it's been pretty successful on Reddit, 4Chan, and Twitter as a means of rewarding people who create useful / insightful things. The YouTube tipbot is starting to get some traction now too.
Here's a post from yesterday that includes some statistics about how much volume in USD is actually distributed on Reddit via the Dogecoin vs. Bitcoin tipbots respectively: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/20ms1i/if_we_want_a...
I hate mining too but you need a decentralized method to keep people from subverting the decision-making process and give them an incentive to participate. I would love a more environmentally friendly method than proof-of-work but I fear you would have to compromise the decentralization aspect to achieve it.
Proof of stake is more secure than proof of work, but the problem is that you have to give the new coins to the people with the coins, so it incentivizes hoarding just as much as deflation would.
I am very naive when it comes to the bitcoin and dogecoin protocols. However, my understanding was that mining is what keeps the currency running and you are actually validating transactions. For doing this work you are "rewarded" with coins. Not really a waste of resources if you are helping run something you support.
The one miner who solves each block validates the transactions and receives the reward. For every other miner, it's wasted electricity.
That's not how it works. If every miner got a reward, then the decentralized network simply wouldn't work.
The one miner who solves the block gets the reward. All miners who tried to solve the same block (and that would be every other miner who didn't get a solution in first) have wasted their time and do not get a reward.
I'm not sure what we're disagreeing about?
The disagreement is over whether the non-rewarded computation is a "waste." I don't think it is, because it's crucial to the operation of the network.
Of course, most mining is done by pools, where the reward is shared out to all those who contributed hash power. So saying "one" miner is not quite right.
Definitely true. I co-run a small dogecoin pool myself.
But I find the illusion that pools perpetuate very interesting.
In reality, only one miner does solve the block - it's just that the payout goes to the pool for redistribution.
This essentially means that pools reward wrong answers to the same degree that they reward correct answers (unless the pool is configure to give block-finder rewards).
Mining is designed to be a waste of resources. It is kept artificially hard to prevent someone from creating a billion sock puppets and overtaking the network for malicious reasons. To entice people to use their valuable computing power and electricity on an artificially hard problem there must be some incentive.
The cost of mining (mainly electricity) will trend towards zero. In the future mining will run on solar power.
The larger cost is the ecological toll underlying the production of the hardware.
Dogecoin is only semi-inflationary by accident, so it's not exactly an example of sound economic thinking. There are several altcoins that are aiming to be explicitly inflationary but this also eliminates the incentive for early adopters to hype them to the moon.
Proof of stake has been proposed as an efficient alternative to mining but it's not clear whether it will work.
As a shibe, I always like it when Dogecoin stuff is on hackernews.
Shh... on the internet, no one knows you're a dog!
Dogecoin has got a great attitude, think Bitcoin would benefit from being more endearing.
To the average person, Dogecoin is basically Bitcoin without any of the libertarianism. It's kind of hilarious how mad some of the Bitcoin guys get whenever Dogecoin is in the news.
How do they actually go about converting Dogecoin to Dollars? Evertyhing I've read and heard about Dogecoin is that it's kind of a novelty thing, so are there actually people out there who are paying to convert dollars to doge?
There's a growing list of exchanges where you can do this
Vault of Satoshi charges $99/mo for access to their exchange? That seems absurdly high just for access. I wonder why people would pay that much, and how popular it is?
EDIT: Ah. $99/mo in exchange for zero trade fees. That's actually an interesting dynamic.
That is interesting. It's also interesting to think about it as:
- There are trade fees, but only to a maximum of $99/mo, and only if you remember to ask us to cap them.
Can any of these sites actually realize that in actual USD in a reasonable timeframe? How much time and effort and waiting does it take to see $11k in their hands? Or do they have to do transactions of $100/max once per week with a waiting time of 10 days each?
Apparently the most common approach is to trade for Bitcoin on an exchange and then exchange that for dollars.
That used to be the most common before moolah, kraken, vault of satoshi, etc. came along.
Can confirm.
Kraken is eventually going to enable me to convert it directly into USD, but it still has some regulatory hoops to go through in California at least.
Daily DOGE trading volume is in the hundreds of thousands USD equivalent. Selling $30k worth is easy.
Check the order book for just one exchange (Cryptsy DOGE/BTC). Very liquid. There are tens of millions of DOGE worth of open buy orders at any moment time. https://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/cryptsy/dogebtc
You can buy however much people are selling. I bought up to $2000 of Dogecoin at one time. I've regularly seen orders for significantly more than that though. The transaction itself is instantaneous, but of course wiring the USD to the exchange took 48 hours.
The timeframe is how long an ACH transaction to your bank takes. Almost all exchanges have daily and weekly limits, ranging from $4,000 - $10,000 a day but they will often up those limits if you give them more personally identifying information.
A normal SEPA (euro zone) transfer of < $13k takes 1-2 days, I don't know how long other transfers take.
How I do it:
Go to CoinedUp and convert dogecoin -> bitcoin. Send bitcoin to coinbase. Sell bitcoin on coinbase.
Kraken isn't open to USD transactions in my area yet.
Also - selling doge to private parties for USD, possibly in person.
IIRC there's a couple of exchanges that do DOGE->USD.. but you can also do DOGE->BTC->USD.
Is it true that Dogecoin's value is kept artificially low?
It's inflationary, coins will never stop being created and they're mined extremely quickly
https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/issues/23#issuecomment-...
its inflationary in the sense that 5% and decreasing new coins are mineable each year after all 100 billion original coins are mined,
the actual % inflation is comparable to bitcoin's and less than litecoin's.
Is it true that bitcoin's value is kept artificially high?
Phrased another way: define 'artificially' in this context.
There was a problem with multipools exploiting the 'random' block reward - which wasn't truly random - and getting more coins than they normally would. As of now this has been fixed and the price should go up a bit. Also, in about month time the block reward will halve.
Why would fixing that issue cause the price to go up? There was still the same amount of coins created.
Also - they apparently fixed it by making the block reward fixed. http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/2014/03/13/dogecoin-forks-aga...
Prices are the result of supply vs demand on the exchange market; total supply is a secondary factor.
Multipool miners will generally sell for BTC/fiat immediately, creating lots of supply and thus a consistent downward pressure on prices.
General miners will be more likely to hold or use instead, creating less sell pressure.
By making Doge less profitable to the multipools, they are less likely to mine it, and even if they continue they will get less Doge per block. And that means less supply in the exchanges, which will help the price.
Because more of the mined coins are now going to believers in the currency, rather than mercenary miners immediately selling it for Bitcoin.
But then those coins are sold on an exchange for bitcoins, then the exchange sells them back to believers. They end up in believer's hands anyways.
Yes, the 100 Billion cap plays a huge role here.
With so many Dogecoins flooding the market, it is likely that Doge will remain near worthless forever. Which means it will always be an easy coin to experiment with.
Doge and bitcoin are very easily divisible, so that's not why they're more or less valuable. Bitcoins are rewarded at 250,000,000 satoshis/block!
Yes, but both have a practically fixed transaction fee of 0.01 BTC or 0.01 DOGE. BTC transaction fees (by default) cost $0.05 now. DOGE transaction fees are basically free.
In its haste for profit-earning, the BTC community has screwed its own coin for "tipping". I ain't paying no 5% tax on $1 tips on the BTC network.
You're way off. The minimum recommended/default transaction fee is .0001 btc. This can change in the future, it is all about what the miners choose to accept, transaction fees are not fixed.
For fun I sent a transaction of about .3 btc with a fee of .0.00005 btc. It was confirmed in about a day - or so I thought, because on blockchain.info it says +9 minutes so I don't know if that is the confirmation time or not.
The transaction in question - https://blockchain.info/tx/7e2bfff207e5fb6a02890024e790c921e...
I missed two zeros on my BTC number, but my dollar amount remains the same. 0.0001 BTC at $500 per BTC == 5 cents per transaction.
You can pay less to lower your priority of course, or pay more to raise your priority. Similarly, miners can focus on higher priority transactions to make their profit.
Nonetheless, the real effects of deflation are beginning to show. BTC is a worse coin than DOGE for internet tipping. It costs more per transaction and takes longer for those transactions to take place. And as long as the BTC community is blinded by deflationary greed, the problem will remain.
Basically, I can transfer money with DOGE within minutes for nearly free (roughly one ten-thousanth of a penny), or I can use BTC to transfer money within hours for $0.05... or within days if I try to be cheaper.
I'm pretty sure Ellen's selfie tweet cost Samsung more than $11,000.
Unrelated to the story (only to the title) but I bet a sponsored tweet from some big celeb could cost more than that.
So generous
Since Forbes insists on putting an ad wall in front of their content, here's the full text of the article without ads:
Dogecoin – Bitcoin’s goofy little brother – has just made history. A member of the Dogecoin community donated 14 million Dogecoins (worth about US$11,000 on the exchanges) to a charity with one single message on Twitter. That tweet, to an automated Twitter-bot, is the most money ever donated or sent directly via a tweet.
The Dogecoins were for Doge4Water, a charity set up to help people in Kenya get clean drinking water. The Dogecoins will be converted to real money, and that money will be used to build new wells. The tweet, by an anonymous person who goes by @savethemhood, helped to push the Doge4Water to well past its 40 million Dogecoin (US$30,000) goal. The charity had hoped to reach it by March 22nd, which is World Water Day, and it met that target with a week to spare.
This isn’t the first time the Dogecoin community showed its charitable nature. Last month it raised enough money to help get the broke Jamaican Bobsled Team (yes, that one) to the Sochi Winter Olympics. The generosity makes sense, as Dogecoin is positioned to be the “tipping currency” of the Internet.
For a crypto-currency that was started as something of a joke, Dogecoin is doing some good, and part of that is through the sheer number of Dogecoin users. By volume, it’s the most-traded crypto-currency in the world. Part of that is because it’s so easy and cheap to get into. A person can buy-in for as little as a dollar (US$1 is worth about 1300 Dogecoins at the time this post went live), and the tipping culture is rife within the community. For example, on the Dogecoin sub-reddit, users are encouraged to tip one another small amounts of Dogecoin for insightful or positive comments along with “upvotes” (the quasi-currency of Reddit).
The Dogecoin community has the aim of expanding that “tipping” culture to the rest of the internet by keeping the price of Dogecoin artificially low. Unlike Bitcoin, Dogecoin is not meant to be an investment currency, so much of the shiftiness that Bitcoin users have had to endure likely won’t make its way to the Dogecoin world (though that’s not to say it’s immune).
Still, there’s always going to be some controversy with crypto-currencies, and besides being used as a force for good for bobsledders and Kenyan villagers, Dogecoin, with its catch phrases, such as “wow” and “such currency” and “so crypto”, could be a great way to explore what these new virtual currencies can and can’t do, all while maintaining a sense of humor.
Since forbes insists on putting an ad wall in front of their content, you're going to lift the copyrighted content in its entirety and paste it here instead of just clicking 'skip this ad'? (And if you have ABP, the ad is blank.)
Doesn't the adwall go away if you click the link a second time?
what exactly is wrong with using Adblock?
Doesnt work on the Forbes interstitial, simple as that. Same for adf.ly and other such crapsites. ABP doesnt show the ads but cannot redirect the crapsite.
I just click the link at the top to skip the blank (with adblock) page with the Quote Of The Day...