Jamaican bobsleigh team raises $25k in Dogecoin

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/20/jamaican-bobsled-team-raises-dogecoin-winter-olympics

by epaga • 13 years ago

132 48 13 years ago

JetSpiegel• 13 years ago

"Joke currency" my ass!

ye4• 13 years ago

It still is. Can you name a single business that accepts it other than the exchanges? (And there's probably a few, but nobody knows them).

Of course, doesn't mean it will stay that way, though I have a hard time believing it will ever lose its joke status.

dpiers3• 13 years ago

There's a directory: http://dogebiz.net/

ing33k• 13 years ago

http://shopdoge.com/

JohnTHaller6• 13 years ago

On the numbers, I think more businesses accept dogecoin than bitcoin. And the volume of dogecoin transactions exceeded bitcoin transactions the other day. The transactions and businesses are smaller.

All cryptocurrency is 'joke status' to a certain extent with the vast majority of people. Personally, I think it'd be genuinely funny for dogecoin to grow to be the most popular and valuable cryptocurrency.

skybrian• 13 years ago

Dogecoin is doing well because it's a joke currency. People can try out cryptocoins in a friendly community with trivial amounts (in dollars) and little risk.

NigelTufnel• 13 years ago

Didn't know that Jamaicans are into bobsleigh. Didn't know that Dogecoin exist.

Today is the Knowledge Day.

sp332• 13 years ago

Jamaicans aren't into bobsleigh, that's why there was no money to send the team.

Renaud• 13 years ago

They've been into bobsleight on and off for the past 26 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaica_national_bobsleigh_team

Their story inspired a comedy, Cool Runnings: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106611/

jameshart• 13 years ago

Jamaicans are into sprinting - it is basically the national sport. In the bob, three skills are needed: sprinting while pushing a bob, sitting very still, and steering, and only one person needs to do steering. And the sprinting bit is quite important. Bobsleigh is like a natural pivot into a new market for sprinters.

awkward• 13 years ago

I can't wait for Cool Runnings 2: wow very sponsored.

Einstalbert• 13 years ago

Wow.

frandroid• 13 years ago

Such wow.

olympus2• 13 years ago

I'm not familiar with how much 26MM Dogecoin is in relation to the total amount of Dogecoin that's been mined, but it will be interesting to see what happens to the exchange rate as it gets converted into "real" money so the team can pay for the trip to Sochi. The article mentioned that the fundraiser may have raised the price of Doge itself, and I expect that bubble will pop as soon as the Jamaicans find out that you can't buy plane tickets with Doge (yet).

paulnewmanseyes• 13 years ago

They've already converted the 26m DOGE into $25,000, it says in the last two paragraphs.

olympus2• 13 years ago

I read that, but for some reason it didn't register that the Dogecoin was already converted. Thank you for clearing that up for me.

naterator• 13 years ago

There can be up to 100B Dogecoin (ever), so this represents ~0.03% of that. There are about 32B mined now, so 0.08% of doge in existence.

JohnTHaller6• 13 years ago

It was already converted into USD and donated to them.

aestra2• 13 years ago

100,000,000,000 dogecoin will be mined total (one hundred billion)

https://dogechain.info/chain/Dogecoin/statistics

32.32%(!) of that has already been mined. That's 32,323,788,534 dogecoin.

26 million is .08% of all dogecoins that have been mined.

melarina• 13 years ago

About a billion coins are being added per day. That will change 2 weeks from now when the block reward halves. What's kind of interesting about Dogecoin is that there are so many people mining it. The rapid rate at which coins are being released combined with the large number of miners means that currently the top 100 addresses only hold 36.9% of all coins, the lowest concentration of wealth of any altcoin by a wide margin.

dpiers3• 13 years ago

The exchange rate took a hit as the 26MM was sold off for Bitcoins, but it has since bounced back. In the last 24 hours, there have been 7MM USD worth of transactions in Dogecoins, more than any cryptocurrency except Bitcoin.

ayu• 13 years ago

full disclosure: I own a small amount of dogecoin.

Original spec for Dogecoin: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=361813.0

We're on block 65K. The first halving is scheduled for block 100K or Feb 14.

Dogecoin trade volume is around #2 #3 in cryptocoin markets, so actually it's very liquid. In practical terms, there's been $7M USD in trading volume in the last 24h. Converting 10s of M Doge into BTC into USD would be very easy.

aestra2• 13 years ago

Wow, in the article it said that this actually affected the dogecoin/bitcoin exchange rate.

So many people had been donating, in fact, that they seemed to raise the price of the currency itself; in 12 hours, the Dogecoin to Bitcoin exchange rate rose by 50%.

eterm• 13 years ago

And rather than wait for it all to be over then try to liquidate the donated coins (and realise that would no longer be possible), they were selling the coins as they were donated, to the very people buying them to donate.

The net effect is that dollars themselves were donated effectively by means of doge.

Alex3917• 13 years ago

The rise was due to a single investor in China manipulating the market. Even if the entire donation was purchased in the exchanges, 25k isn't enough money to significantly affect the price.

mrkickling2• 13 years ago

According to some rumours, I honestly don't believe it. Not impossible though.

lvs• 13 years ago

Blockchain link or it didn't happen.

mrkickling2• 13 years ago

Why would the donations be the reason for the 50% rise?

flatline• 13 years ago

Markets are complex systems and defy simple explanations, but many analysts make a living from ignoring this fact and making it seem like everything can be summed up in a 10 second soundbite. That sell was a drop in the bucket compared to the volume dogecoin has seen on the exchanges in the past 24 hours. Rumors abound about why the price has skyrocketed but I think that it boils down to a few things:

  - dedicated, welcoming community
  - coin ecosystem: well-orchestrated launch, smart developers 
    and pool operators, etc.
  - increased hashrate, second now only to that of bitcoin and litecoin.  
    This is partly from the community and partly from speculators: 
    success breeds success.
  - lots of good publicity

vezzy-fnord• 13 years ago

It seems to me that it's now inevitable (for better or for worse) that Dogecoin will become the bronze to Litecoin's silver, or in other words 3rd highest valued cryptocurrency.

dpiers3• 13 years ago

Dogecoin has surpassed Litecoin's transaction volume in USD for the last two days. It's still finding its place in the world, and it's possible that place isn't 3rd.

SwellJoe• 13 years ago

I suspect Litecoin will fade into non-existence, with Peercoin (or some other somewhat novel approach to the problem) replacing it. LTC has nothing over Bitcoin...it's merely still mine-able on GPUs, which is good for miners that have GPU farms[1], but not all that useful for anybody else. Maybe it has value as an alternative blockchain to BTC, should something terrible happen to BTC, but many cryptocurrencies could provide that.

Doge is roughly identical to Litecoin, but more fun.

1-I have a modest GPU mining setup, and I mine LTC and Doge.

waylandsmithers• 13 years ago

Maybe this is fueled, at least in part, by others who had the same experience I did?

1. Hear the Jamaican bobsled team needs cash to get to Sochi. 2. Want to help- surely there is a fund online people can donate to? 3. Search google, find nothing. 4. Search reddit, only related thread is in /r/dogecoin.

jquery2• 13 years ago

Most of the $25k donation was from a single, large owner of Dogecoin. Flagged for being little more than shameless pumping of a "joke" (tee hee!) currency. (disclaimer: I own some Dogecoin to hedge my sheer annoyance with it against the money I'm making from its absurd success).

cheald2• 13 years ago

Well, it's over $34k now, so I'm not sure that it's just "shameless pumping".

It's a fun story about a joke cryptocurrency. Roll with it.

jquery2• 13 years ago

Fair enough, I unflagged the story. My annoyance probably stems from all the dogecoin fans calling it a "joke" currency to mask their greed. It was a joke currency two months ago. Now it's a liquid, $MM cryptocurrency second to Bitcoin.

untilHellbanned2• 13 years ago

think Dogecoin will succeed precisely because it's perceived as lighthearted,

this is reminiscent of lots of internet successes: twitter, reddit, dropbox, etc.

friendly wins the internet

untilHellbanned2• 13 years ago

dogecoin is going through the roof http://coinmarketcap.com/

Jamaican bobsleigh team raises $25k in Dogecoin

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