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Comment by deleted_account | Hacker News Reader

Ok, so we now have Bitcoin, Litecoin, and...Dogecoin, "an open source peer-to-peer cryptocurrency, favored by Shiba Inus worldwide"

Can we officially declare that crypto-currencies have jumped the shark?

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That's how I felt about Dogecoin at first, but their silliness seems to have generated an unusually nice community. I'm starting to think that's a more important factor than I'd realized. It's taken them to #7 in market cap, despite being technically a straight copy of Litecoin. http://coinmarketcap.com/

The community, and particularly the generosity of tipping, seems to have been a driving factor. There are already multiple "tipping bots" on Twitter, which will give out Doge on command.

There's speculation that a similar functionality for Facebook would be like strapping SRB's to the side of the Doge moonrocket, and give it Much Velocity.

You mention the generosity (which I agree with), but also the act of online tipping is a use case that crypto-currencies handle substantially better than me putting a dollar bill in a paper envelope and mailing it or paying a 25 cent transaction fee to tip 10 cents.

Yup. Reddit had bitcoin tipping functionality back when bitcoins were a buck or two. Getting tipped a quarter convinced me to figure out this cryptocurrency thing. Taking that mechanism outside of the Reddit sandbox is a big help.

And yeah, I spent my quarter-BTC on Humble Bundles. Oops.

We'll see how long this lasts if Dogecoins become worth a lot more. BTC used to be like this, too, with many "Bitcoin faucets" dispensing coins at will just for entering an address.

> despite being technically a straight copy of Litecoin.

It's not a straight copy, as it's got random block rewards and different parameters.

But it's very close, yes. Still scrypt based.

>That's how I felt about Dogecoin at first, but their silliness seems to have generated an unusually nice community.

It's so true! When people post really basic or dumb questions they could have googled in twos seconds, or show that absolutely no idea what is going on, people in the doge threads or on the reddit don't act like jerks. They just help the person and then joke with them. It really does feel like something different than other crypto currency communities!

Something so intangible can be so important.

Dogecoin was probably the 200th altcoin released so far... we still have a long way to go. Check out this list for some of the larger ones: http://coinmarketcap.com

Take all the numbers listed there with a grain of salt, though.

Is there an index fund I can buy that tracks (probably just non-BTC) crypto currencies by market share? In other words, I'd like to own a basket of crypto currencies that reflects the market's weighting.

Honestly your best bet for this is bitcoin since almost every other crypto currency measures itself against BTC instead of USD, BTC is sort of a gateway crypto currency.

Prediction for 2014: a meta crypto-currency valued on the number of crypto-currencies in circulation.

Bitcoin, Litecoin, and...Dogecoin

And dozens more.

http://coinmarketcap.com/

I think you've come to the wrong conclusion. Doge might be a funny name, but the crypto is real and so is its trade value against bitcoin. What we're seeing here is that Satoshi's idea is so valuable that it empowers a community to arbitrarily construct a functioning decentralized financial platform, even as a joke.

We're just touching the surface of what cryptocoins are going to mean in the future.

Such cynicism.

Please. This is HN, and you know it. Your account was registerd over 2,000 days ago.

Stop with the pointless comments.

Much stick up the ass. Not wow :(

What on earth is happening to HN?

Get over yourself. Such mad.

I am not upset. I am horrendously disappointed.

I suppose Bitcoiners had a similiar disrespect for HN when they came flooding in ~3 years ago, too.

>I suppose Bitcoiners had a similiar disrespect for HN when they came flooding in ~3 years ago, too.

Perhaps, but I'm not convinced. I imagine the fact that Dogecoin is based around a meme has a lot to do with it.

Just imagine how much more time could be devoted to discussion about how many iPhones does the founder of Path really have.

And yet every day HN is filled with people talking about the things that they like to talk about, and having a nice time doing so, all in their own little space here on this site. For the most part, users like to keep this place intelligent and spam-free.

Want to spam Doge-related comments? I can only imagine that that is what /r/Dogecoin is for. Why bring it here?

Right, but what if people want to talk about doge?

Then talk about Doge. Don't spam "so wow!" sixteen-dozen times.

That's a large part of talking about doge though.

Then I don't really know what to tell you. It sounds to me like "talking about Doge" is a euphemism for "spamming".

        wow

    much disagreement


            many opinions


      wow

much serious bsns.

shibes up in here.

I'm with you. Every dogecoin related thread is full of content-free comments like "such X" and "wow". I do my part to down vote all of them. It's about as funny and clever as a rick-roll at this point.

And I do my part and wish them away really hard because I cannot downvote.

wow

Wow.

Very registerd

My comment does technically have correct grammar and stand on its own as a valid criticism of your comment, which to me is what makes it especially funny. Everybody posting "wow" as a response to you... not so much.

First off: deleted_account is not my username, you were not responding to my comment.

Second: The sentence "I am." technically has correct grammar, but doesn't serve the benefit of anybody reading HN. As does this recently similar comment with many downvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7104994

You should have just hit the downvote or flag button if you thought that OPs comment was truly cynical.

How exactly was deleted_account being cynical anyways by asking the question "Can we officially declare that crypto-currencies have jumped the shark?"?

I do not think you understand the meaning of the word "cynicism" or what it is "to be cynical".

"You should have just hit the downvote"...pot, meet kettle.

One cannot hit the downvote button on replies made to one's own comments.

True, good point. Still, I'm not sure it's a net benefit to kick off a sizable subtree debating the merits of a two-word comment. It might be considered an investment in future comment quality, but downvoting all the meme comments that we are able to is probably as effective.

Personally, as long as it's restricted to articles about dogecoin I don't find it annoying, though I wouldn't want it to spread. Clearly your mileage varies.

Cryptsy, the crypto-currency exchange, have over a hundred markets running right now. Some of them are more active than others, of course.

Don't forget Coinye! "Coinye, formerly Coinye West, is a Scrypt-based cryptocurrency that used the American hip hop artist, Kanye West as its mascot"[1]

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coinye

Coinye's naked worship of celebrity is simply gauche. The irony only makes it worse.

Dogecoin on the other hand... wow.

I for one am looking forward to the 2050s, when china installs the doge as the world reserve currency, and all our paper money is written in rainbow-coloured comic sans.

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