I'm starting to think there's a place for something like Dogecoin as a teaching tool. Although, heh, certainly not if there are too many people take it so seriously on either side of any debate about its value.

Sure, limited liquidity on exchanges like Cryptsy suggests that DOGE currently holds some* "real value" at present. I think it's best described as a high score contest. You can't sell a million USD worth of Doge to anybody right now, but that's not a bad thing! If a crypto-currency-game with a cute mascot gets more kids and teens into learning about computer science and math, we should find ways to keep it innocent and fun!

I remember running Distributed.net as a teenager, just to see how much processing power in keys per second I could personally muster. It was exciting because it taught the power and limitations of parallel computation.

To anybody who has managed to search and hack their way to mining their first Dogecoin (or anycoin) using only source code and blogs? Well done!!! You should consider this a great computing merit badge and maybe even a hacker rite of passage.

I hope future generations will have the same opportunity, community and incentives necessary to participate in the excitement of a gold rush, even if they can only make a actual pennies a day doing it. Having fun while learning at a young age is priceless.

(Looks like about 1.5 million DOGE / 1 BTC?)