Jamaican bobsleigh team raises $25k in Dogecoin | Hacker News Reader

Jamaican bobsleigh team raises $25k in Dogecoin

theguardian.com

132 pointsepaga48 comments

I'm not familiar with how much 26MM Dogecoin is in relation to the total amount of Dogecoin that's been mined, but it will be interesting to see what happens to the exchange rate as it gets converted into "real" money so the team can pay for the trip to Sochi. The article mentioned that the fundraiser may have raised the price of Doge itself, and I expect that bubble will pop as soon as the Jamaicans find out that you can't buy plane tickets with Doge (yet).

They've already converted the 26m DOGE into $25,000, it says in the last two paragraphs.

I read that, but for some reason it didn't register that the Dogecoin was already converted. Thank you for clearing that up for me.

There can be up to 100B Dogecoin (ever), so this represents ~0.03% of that. There are about 32B mined now, so 0.08% of doge in existence.

It was already converted into USD and donated to them.

100,000,000,000 dogecoin will be mined total (one hundred billion)

https://dogechain.info/chain/Dogecoin/statistics

32.32%(!) of that has already been mined. That's 32,323,788,534 dogecoin.

26 million is .08% of all dogecoins that have been mined.

About a billion coins are being added per day. That will change 2 weeks from now when the block reward halves. What's kind of interesting about Dogecoin is that there are so many people mining it. The rapid rate at which coins are being released combined with the large number of miners means that currently the top 100 addresses only hold 36.9% of all coins, the lowest concentration of wealth of any altcoin by a wide margin.

The exchange rate took a hit as the 26MM was sold off for Bitcoins, but it has since bounced back. In the last 24 hours, there have been 7MM USD worth of transactions in Dogecoins, more than any cryptocurrency except Bitcoin.

full disclosure: I own a small amount of dogecoin.

Original spec for Dogecoin: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=361813.0

We're on block 65K. The first halving is scheduled for block 100K or Feb 14.

Dogecoin trade volume is around #2 #3 in cryptocoin markets, so actually it's very liquid. In practical terms, there's been $7M USD in trading volume in the last 24h. Converting 10s of M Doge into BTC into USD would be very easy.

I can't wait for Cool Runnings 2: wow very sponsored.

Didn't know that Jamaicans are into bobsleigh. Didn't know that Dogecoin exist.

Today is the Knowledge Day.

Jamaicans aren't into bobsleigh, that's why there was no money to send the team.

They've been into bobsleight on and off for the past 26 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaica_national_bobsleigh_team

Their story inspired a comedy, Cool Runnings: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106611/

Jamaicans are into sprinting - it is basically the national sport. In the bob, three skills are needed: sprinting while pushing a bob, sitting very still, and steering, and only one person needs to do steering. And the sprinting bit is quite important. Bobsleigh is like a natural pivot into a new market for sprinters.

It seems to me that it's now inevitable (for better or for worse) that Dogecoin will become the bronze to Litecoin's silver, or in other words 3rd highest valued cryptocurrency.

Dogecoin has surpassed Litecoin's transaction volume in USD for the last two days. It's still finding its place in the world, and it's possible that place isn't 3rd.

I suspect Litecoin will fade into non-existence, with Peercoin (or some other somewhat novel approach to the problem) replacing it. LTC has nothing over Bitcoin...it's merely still mine-able on GPUs, which is good for miners that have GPU farms[1], but not all that useful for anybody else. Maybe it has value as an alternative blockchain to BTC, should something terrible happen to BTC, but many cryptocurrencies could provide that.

Doge is roughly identical to Litecoin, but more fun.

1-I have a modest GPU mining setup, and I mine LTC and Doge.

Maybe this is fueled, at least in part, by others who had the same experience I did?

1. Hear the Jamaican bobsled team needs cash to get to Sochi. 2. Want to help- surely there is a fund online people can donate to? 3. Search google, find nothing. 4. Search reddit, only related thread is in /r/dogecoin.

Wow, in the article it said that this actually affected the dogecoin/bitcoin exchange rate.

>So many people had been donating, in fact, that they seemed to raise the price of the currency itself; in 12 hours, the Dogecoin to Bitcoin exchange rate rose by 50%.

And rather than wait for it all to be over then try to liquidate the donated coins (and realise that would no longer be possible), they were selling the coins as they were donated, to the very people buying them to donate.

The net effect is that dollars themselves were donated effectively by means of doge.

The rise was due to a single investor in China manipulating the market. Even if the entire donation was purchased in the exchanges, 25k isn't enough money to significantly affect the price.

According to some rumours, I honestly don't believe it. Not impossible though.

Blockchain link or it didn't happen.

Why would the donations be the reason for the 50% rise?

Markets are complex systems and defy simple explanations, but many analysts make a living from ignoring this fact and making it seem like everything can be summed up in a 10 second soundbite. That sell was a drop in the bucket compared to the volume dogecoin has seen on the exchanges in the past 24 hours. Rumors abound about why the price has skyrocketed but I think that it boils down to a few things:

  - dedicated, welcoming community
  - coin ecosystem: well-orchestrated launch, smart developers 
    and pool operators, etc.
  - increased hashrate, second now only to that of bitcoin and litecoin.  
    This is partly from the community and partly from speculators: 
    success breeds success.
  - lots of good publicity

"Joke currency" my ass!

It still is. Can you name a single business that accepts it other than the exchanges? (And there's probably a few, but nobody knows them).

Of course, doesn't mean it will stay that way, though I have a hard time believing it will ever lose its joke status.

There's a directory: http://dogebiz.net/

http://shopdoge.com/

On the numbers, I think more businesses accept dogecoin than bitcoin. And the volume of dogecoin transactions exceeded bitcoin transactions the other day. The transactions and businesses are smaller.

All cryptocurrency is 'joke status' to a certain extent with the vast majority of people. Personally, I think it'd be genuinely funny for dogecoin to grow to be the most popular and valuable cryptocurrency.

> On the numbers, I think more businesses accept dogecoin than bitcoin. And the volume of dogecoin transactions exceeded bitcoin transactions the other day. The transactions and businesses are smaller.

Any chance the business plans for these businesses is "Make doge jokes on reddit, collect dogecoin donations"?

Yup. That plus art, poetry, and all kinds of little one-offs that individuals can make online and get money for.

> On the numbers, I think more businesses accept dogecoin than bitcoin

Not even close. Thousands of businesses accept Bitcoin. A few dozen accept Doge.

> And the volume of dogecoin transactions exceeded bitcoin transactions the other day

Ah, you mean that stupid metric when you count the number of coins transferred? Yeah, whenever Doge fans mention it, they always forget to mention that there are 21 million bitcoins max, and what, a trillion Doge? You can create a coin with an extilion coins, make one transfer of all of them between two wallets, and voilà, you beat Doge in that metric. That's how dumb it is.

Even at the peak of its popularity, Doge's volume in USD equivalent is 1/3 of Bitcoin. It's still impressive, no argument about it. Just don't make it sound like Doge overtook Bitcoin in any meaningful way.

> All cryptocurrency is 'joke status' to a certain extent with the vast majority of people

I disagree. Most people are not aware, that's true. But Bitcoin is serious business now.

> Not even close. Thousands of businesses accept Bitcoin. A few dozen accept Doge.

Very few real-world businesses, online of off, accept ANY sort of cryptocurrency. So much so that the big bitcoin lists of businesses that accept bitcoins are mostly made up of no-name and very low level online sites with virtual goods (hosting, email, sms, games, etc). They list a few dozen small online stores that sell real hard goods. The one notable exception is Overstock.com, though they don't accept bitcoin themselves. They just added Coinbase as a checkout option ala PayPal, WePay, Scrilla, Amazon Payments, etc (so they have no pricing in bitcoin and never touch bitcoin themselves since Coinbase does a BTC to USD trade immediately on purchase and gives Overstock.com the USD).

> Ah, you mean that stupid metric when you count the number of coins transferred?

Nope. Dogecoin has exceeded bitcoin in terms of number of daily unique transactions. Nothing at all to do with the number of coins transferred or available. Dogecoin sees about double the number of daily unique transactions that bitcoin does. That's pretty astounding considering that Bitcoin just celebrated its 5 year anniversary and Dogecoin just celebrated its one month anniversary. See: http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2014/01/14/dogecoin-tra...

> I disagree. Most people are not aware, that's true. But Bitcoin is serious business now.

Most people that are aware of it think its a silly bubble, pyramid/pump and dump scheme, and/or semi-interesting exercise in distributed computing/trust/etc. A small percentage of the people aware of it think it's serious and have put some skin in the game. I have some BTC some LTC and some DGC that I've been given but have never actually done anything with any of them.

> They list a few dozen small online stores that sell real hard goods

Dead wrong.

There are 2,700 physical stores that accept Bitcoin listed here:

http://coinmap.org/

Plus there are 90,000+ online merchants that accept Bitcoin via Spotify.

Plus there are some major companies joining every day, including Overstock and Tesla.

> Dogecoin sees about double the number of daily unique transactions that bitcoin does.

Ah, sure, but 99%+ of them is people tipping each other for fun on Reddit and other sites, and transactions on exchanges. They are not goods purchased, simply because there are almost no places to spend Doge.

Only 2,700 physical stores in the entire world is still 0.00% penetration. Zooming in on the map on NYC shows a total of 61 entries for all 5 boroughs of NYC and the entire surrounding area. For comparison, there are over 150 Starbucks in Manhattan alone. In my entire borough of Queens, only 2 stores take bitcoin and one of them is a just a POS company that is promoting a POS that takes bitcoin. I went and looked at the websites of a few of the other businesses listed around NYC and they made no mention of bitcoin. On a serious note, I'd be curious if a retail store can even properly take bitcoin in a standard retail transaction given that it currently takes around 10 minutes to confirm a bitcoin transaction[1], unlike cash which is instant or credit card which is 5-10 seconds.

[1] Source: http://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time

> Plus there are 90,000+ online merchants that accept Bitcoin via Spotify.

I think you mean that 75,000+ online merchants have the option of accepting bitcoin via Shopify if they decide to enable it. Shopify merchants must explicitly enable it (it's off by default) and there have been no numbers released on how many have.

> Plus there are some major companies joining every day, including Overstock and Tesla.

As discussed previously, Overstock isn't pricing in bitcoin or assuming any of the risk of bitcoin. Overstock never even touches it, just letting Coinbase be a 'pay via' vendor ala PayPal or Google Wallet and only dealing in USD for pricing and their actual payment from Coinbase done via a realtime conversion of BTC to USD. Mind you, I'm not minimizing that as it's still a pretty big deal.

Tesla doesn't accept bitcoins. That Tesla S from the story in December was purchased at a 3rd party dealership in USD that were converted from bitcoins. The story that he walked in to a Tesla dealership and bought it with bitcoins was a bit of an exaggeration that some bitcoin fans seem to keep repeating.

> Ah, sure, but 99%+ of them is people tipping each other for fun on Reddit and other sites, and transactions on exchanges. They are not goods purchased, simply because there are almost no places to spend Doge.

Quite true. But it's still very impressive for a cryptocurrency only one month old compared to the 5 year old bitcoin. When bitcoin came out, people used it to tip each other and do silly things on reddit, too, but nowhere close to the numbers you see from dogecoin now.

Doesn't matter, your "few dozen" was a complete lie.

So, your misremembered/wildly incorrect/completely made up 'facts', and repeated false rumors don't matter? And yet it's a 'lie' to correctly point out that multiple bitcoin store lists online only list a few dozen stores that accept bitcoin and sell hard goods? Think I'll refrain from feeding this troll further.

Dogecoin is doing well because it's a joke currency. People can try out cryptocoins in a friendly community with trivial amounts (in dollars) and little risk.

think Dogecoin will succeed precisely because it's perceived as lighthearted,

this is reminiscent of lots of internet successes: twitter, reddit, dropbox, etc.

friendly wins the internet

Most of the $25k donation was from a single, large owner of Dogecoin. Flagged for being little more than shameless pumping of a "joke" (tee hee!) currency. (disclaimer: I own some Dogecoin to hedge my sheer annoyance with it against the money I'm making from its absurd success).

Well, it's over $34k now, so I'm not sure that it's just "shameless pumping".

It's a fun story about a joke cryptocurrency. Roll with it.

Fair enough, I unflagged the story. My annoyance probably stems from all the dogecoin fans calling it a "joke" currency to mask their greed. It was a joke currency two months ago. Now it's a liquid, $MM cryptocurrency second to Bitcoin.

It's still a joke, which is why it does well. It's got a serious strain, but it's firmly rooted in internet sillyness and people throw it around willy-nilly right now specifically because it's a "joke" with some minimal amount of value. People treat it as functionally equivalent to reddit karma or whatever - at the moment, it's broadly used as kind of a secondary upvote. Just because it's a joke doesn't mean it can't also be a serious cryptocurrency. It's just rebranded Litecoin, after all.

As far as "second to bitcoin", not quite. Its market cap jumped quite a bit in the past day, but it's still 8th on the list according to http://coinmarketcap.com/

I think those are different sets of people for the most part. The people who think of it as a currency-of-fun are still there, but investors/speculators/scammers have joined too.

Wow.

Such wow.

dogecoin is going through the roof http://coinmarketcap.com/

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