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I was sixteen when I got my first Dogecoins.
For almost a year, me and my brother, we would always go 'doge' on eachother. That's where we lure the other person in with a serious tone and when they get all concerned, we hit them with 100% pure doge. It was our thing. We'd get other people all the time, but that was easy. The real challenge was to doge eachother. Everyone thought we were a little spun, but it wasn't about making sense. It was about having fun. Sometimes that's as good a reason as any.
But that all ended when he went away to college.
Then, on Christmas Eve of that year I got a Facebook message from my brother saying that he had a gift for me if I could keep a secret. He told me he'd made a lot of money on that 'Bitcoin thing', and he wanted to give me a little bit for Christmas. I'd heard him arguing with my parents about Bitcoin a few times before -- ranting about how they had to invest, how it was going to change the world.
It all felt so exciting when he sent me a link and told me to download the program so he could send me my coins. It felt like we were computer hackers or something. When I opened the wallet software on my computer and the big Dogecoin logo came up, I knew then. I had been doged. The million Dogecoins sitting in my wallet felt like Fool's Gold, their hilarious little doge faces mocking me.
"wow"
"so crypto"
"many coins"
"awesome"
I was deflated. It was the last time my brother and I doged.
The next time Dogecoin crossed my mind was two years later. I remember my arms falling limp at the sound of her voice. I remember the pizza slowly slipping from my gaping mouth. I remember the chuckle of the news anchor as she repeated the punchline. "Can you believe it?" She gasped "People are paying a whole dollar for a single Dogecoin!"
I remember tearing through my dormroom closet under piles of unwashed clothes for my old computer.
"wow"
"very rich"
--- Ɖ ---
I was a freshman and I had over a million dollars of Dogecoin. By the time I graduated, it was worth $60 million and that was after paying off school, my parent's debt, buying a car, a house for my brother, and setting up my next few years travelling. I could hardly believe it. I think part of me just wanted to take what I had and split before somebody somewhere realized it was all a mistake.
We didn't understand exponential change yet, but the world was definitely changing. You could feel it. It was a really exciting few years. By the time I left for my travels I could pay for most things in the city using my Dogecoin. I even paid my taxes in Dogecoin. Hah - taxes!
While abroad, I made due with swapping local currencies for Dogecoin in major cities. I kept emergency Dogecoin in a brain wallet but I was careful not to even associate myself with Dogecoin. I was always afraid someone might discover it and kidnap me. Hold me ransom. I wouldn't have been the first person I'd heard of being abducted for their Dogecoin. I didn't want to be the last. I kept my travels in paper money. I wanted to just see what the world was. No doge.
It wasn't until I reached Nairobi in 2022 that I finally understood what Dogecoin had become. When I left, Dogecoin was just one of several major digital currencies. Bitcoin was top dog, followed by the USD and Litecoin. Dogecoin was 7th. Granted that included all the national digital currencies and the Eurocoin. But in the three years I'd been gone, Dogecoin had taken over completely.
You could see that demented little Doge face in windows. On signs. At night he'd peer out from darkened shops in a wash of neon. I would wander the markets and hear people exclaim in unabashedly broken English "so nice!" "wow!" "how money!" They were selling their wares for dust. Fractions of fractions of a Dogecoin.
At this point I was a billionaire. And by no small margin.
Sitting in a small shack pegged into a rockwall on the edge of Lake Mugumoini, I scoured the web for answers. Wikipedia, Twitter, Reddit. I watched clips from CNN with reporters wearing Doge-themed ties and captions that popped up on screen. "so point" "v true" I needed to know exactly what happened -- how it happened. How did Dogecoin become the biggest currency in the world?
--- Ɖ ---
I went looking for rational answers. I found none. None that satisfied me, anyway. My mind balked at the realness of it.
The nearest I had to an explanation for Dogecoin's success I would later formalize into a paper called The Perfect Repost Conjecture during my studies at Singularity University. I theorized that Dogecoin's novelty appeal was an innevitability of the internet. The product of rampant memetic selection. Maybe it somehow outpaced the fatigue effect to achieve perfect longevity, and perhaps the original meme held the key. I conjected that if you modelled the Doge meme's popularity on Reddit over time, you could see predictive markers for Dogecoin's market performance. The data was good. For years, my paper accurately modelled the coin's growth. There were always new markets, economies, cultures or kids to discover Dogecoin. There was always someone for whom Doge was original content, until it had overtaken nearly everything.
A colleague expanded on my theory with some evolutionary-psychology hullaballo about how the dog is Man's first creation, and reflects our intelligence without possessing the 'taint' of free will, therefore making doge a perfect vessel for 'pure value' and blah, blah. I guess there was still a hunger for the "Why" of it all then. The idea that Doge represented all of the goodness of humanity and none of its darkness really hit home. The TIME Man of the Year cover for Doge read "Man's Best Repost". We were both cited. It was an honor.
We thought Doge was invincible.
--- Ɖ ---
October 2029 marked the beginning of the Great Dogepression. The global market stuttered and stalled. It hit some worse than others. Me, one of the richest shibes in the world, sitting atop my tower of glass and whirring intelligence... I was safe. But some a little closer to the margins weren't so lucky. Robots, cars, entire houses ripped from them programatically by the chain-of-title in the blockchain. It was instantaneous. Code doesn't negotiate.
The news was barking some line about the crisis being attributed to overpopulation, with that go-to "ship to mars" buzz-caption, but everybody knew something more was going on. Markets seemed intentionally frozen by major financial institutions -- maybe Dogebase or the Interntational Doge Fund. Nobody seemed to know. Several months later, the truth of it all would come to light.
On New Years Day, after years of tensions building to almost comical heights over demanded military concessions from North Korea, the leaked revelation of the country's massive decomissioned Dogecoin mining operation scrambled the global economy like it was your brain on drugs. They'd secretly run the world's largest Doge mining operation for the first decade of Dogecoin's rise. Forensic analysis of the blockchain suggested they could control as much as 13% of the global dogeconomy. A kill switch. Dogecoin had been weaponized.
"How did it come to this?" I remember thinking, as I watched Doge deliver the calamitous news on DNN with succinct clarity.
The next few weeks saw the world slip deeper and deeper into chaos. No other coins possessed the repostability that gave Dogecoin its stability. Goodcoin briefly resurfaced. Even Bitcoin was showing signs of life following the revelation that Satoshi Nakamoto was, in fact, Al Gore.
But it was too late.
When the bombs started falling, my mind went to my brother. I only had a flash to think my last thoughts. The thoughts that would echo after me for a thousand lifetimes in this fated doge eat doge world.
"amaze"
"so scare"
"such light"