Shiva Keshavan, an Olympic luger from India, wasn't sure whether he could afford to attend the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. He had to raise $5,000 in a matter of days.
But in only three hours, a small but active section on the popular website Reddit raised the necessary funds through the use of Dogecoin, a new digital "cryptocurrency". Just weeks earlier, Reddit users helped the Jamaican Olympic bobsled team get to Sochi by donating $30,000 worth of Dogecoins over a 24-hour period.
Bitcoin is the most famous type of cryptocurrency, but it's far from the only one. Unlike government-backed currencies, which are usually regulated and created by a central bank, cryptocurrencies are generated by computers that solve a complex series of algorithms and rely on decentralised, peer-to-peer networks.
Aside from Dogecoin - which was named after an Internet meme displaying a dog speaking in grammatically incorrect English - other cryptocurrencies include Litecoin, Fedoracoin, Coinye, and Ethereum. Many of these are slightly different variants of Bitcoin with their own unique coding.
Read more: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/01/rise-cryptocurrencies-201413012034867124.html