Dogecoin was founded by Billy Markus, a programmer and former engineer at IBM. He began to develop a currency called Bells. Billy Markus wanted to make his currency popular and easily recognizable to investors and took influences from the game Animal Crossing. Billy Markus also did not want his currency to be associated with Silk Road, where bitcoin was widely used. Markus, and his friend Jackson Palmer, were tweeted to base their currency on the Doge meme instead.

They then began their partnership; Palmer soon bought the domain dogecoin.com, and Markus developed an official wallet. By December 17, a few weeks after the launch of the cryptocurrency, six percent of the 100 billion total dogecoin had already been mined, and by December 19, the value of dogecoin had risen by over 300 percent in the market, from $ 0.00026 to 0.00099 US dollars.

This all happened while bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were declining, due to China’s new regulation banning bitcoin from their banks. On December 22, dogecoin experienced its first stock market crash, dropping 80 percent. On Christmas Day 2013, the first major attempted theft of dogecoin took place, in which several million dogecoins were stolen by hackers who hacked into the file system on the website Dogewallet.

Markus based dogecoin on the existing cryptocurrency litecoin. Dogecoin, like litecoin, uses a script as an encryption algorithm for transactions and currency extraction. Unlike bitcoins SHA (Secure Hash Algorithms), scripts require more hardware and are not as useful for bitcoins-specific hardware. The currency will reach a total of 100 billion dogecoin after all coins have been mined. Dogecoin has succeeded well in spreading its currency and exchange exchanges to bitcoin and litecoin, as well as several so-called pools, have emerged that exchange and extract the currency.

The currency’s popularity and value are growing rapidly, and on December 22, the exchange rate was 1 US dollar for 3130 dogecoin. However, on December 24, 2013, the Central Bank of India warned users of the risks of investing in dogecoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Anyone wishing to use dogecoin can create one or more dogecoin addresses, which are collected and followed up in virtual wallets. A dogecoin address is based on asymmetric encryption and has a private and a public key to the amount of money in it. The public key is the address and the private key is used to send money out of the address to another address.

Since a dogecoin wallet is just a collection of key pairs, it is very important to keep the private key secret. If the private key for an address is not kept secret, anyone has the opportunity to send money from that address. Wallets allow the user to perform transactions between addresses by requesting an update of the blockchain, the public transaction log. Wallets come in various forms: applications for mobile devices and computers, hardware, and paper tokens.

Most common dogecoin wallets

• Dogecoin-Qt: the official wallet for dogecoin. It is available for Windows and Apple OS X, but there is also a porting of the application to Linux.
• Dogevault: the official online wallet. Web-based wallets are preferred because they are easier to use and do not require any software installation.
• Dogecoin Wallet: an app that acts as an offline wallet for mobile phones with the Android operating system.

There are several online exchanges that deal with DOGE / BTC and DOGE / LTC. The price is very volatile due to the short “life” of the currency.

On December 19, 2020, the price of a DOGE was 0.00095 US dollars, in February 2021 the price was 0.07204. This after DOGE was close to reaching 0.08500 US dollars the days before through a squeeze that was largely coordinated on Reddit, and further intensified by Elon Musk tweeting about Dogecoin.

The currency’s volatile history has not been a deterrent for the cryptocurrency and with Mark Cubans most recent announcement around DOGE, it seems like more companies will accept it as payments.