Dogecoin

Unlike the case with many other cryptocurrencies, the founders of dogecoin didn’t launch a public sale or “premine” coins prior to the token’s launch. Instead, a total supply limit of 100 billion coins was set and anyone with a laptop or smartphone could begin mining doge immediately.

What was also unique about dogecoin was its block reward schedule. Copying another project’s schedule called LuckyCoin, doge block rewards were completely random, meaning miners could receive anything from 0 to 1 million doge for mining a single block. The range of coins available for block rewards was tapered every 100,000 blocks until 2014 when the project’s founders decided to change the block reward system to a fixed schedule. After that point, successful miners received 10,000 doge per block for their efforts.

Despite dogecoin’s immediate popularity among early crypto users, it experienced only two short-lived big price jumps during its first almost four years in the market. The first took place almost immediately after the token went live, when its price soared 1,061% in 15 days from $0.0002 to $0.0023. The second big hike took place in March 2017 during the early stages of a crypto bull market. Doge’s price rose by 1,494% to a peak of $0.004 – the highest price it had been since launching.

While many other digital assets continued to rise through the second quarter of 2017, doge prices fell below $0.001. It wasn’t until November 2017, when doge’s price found support again from bullish investors. By January 2018, doge’s price reached a peak of $0.018.

It took over three years for doge to reach that level again, after it experienced a prolonged period of low trading activity as hype for the token waned. Renewed interest spurred by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and other celebrity supporters at the start of 2021 sent doge’s price surging past its previous all-time high. The coin posted a 9,884% gain between January and May. By the end of the rally, doge had peaked at a new all-time high of $0.74.

Dogecoin’s blockchain operates using a proof-of-work consensus mechanism – the same system Bitcoin uses for network participants to reach an agreement on the data being added to the blockchain.

Dogecoin’s mining code was initially copied from another crypto project called LuckyCoin. LuckyCoin – a fork) of Litecoin, which is a fork of Bitcoin – featured a completely random block reward schedule where miners could receive zero or potentially thousands of free coins for producing new blocks. Australian entrepreneur Jackson Palmer and American software engineer Billy Markus – the two creators of dogecoin – believed the randomness would annoy dogecoin miners and prevent them from actually using the token long term.

As the community grew around dogecoin, however, Palmer and Markus eventually decided to change this to a fixed block reward schedule in March 2014. Blocks created under the new schedule contained 10,000 dogecoin, meaning 5.2 billion dogecoins are mined each year.

Dogecoin’s mining difficulty adjustment, which controls how hard or easy it is to find a block, is tweaked every block, unlike Bitcoin, which adjusts every 2,016 blocks.

In 2014, Litecoin creator Charlie Lee proposed the idea of merge-mining dogecoin and litecoin. This idea of “merged mining” meant miners would mine both dogecoin and litecoin simultaneously, helping to boost the network security of Dogecoin. Palmer and Markus accepted Lee’s proposal four months later. That resulted in Dogecoin producing faster blocks than Bitcoin (1 minute vs. 10 minutes), meaning doge transactions are significantly faster than Bitcoin transactions.