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Most Expensive Tweet Ever Sends $11,000 To Kenyan Water Charity Via Dogecoin

• sp332 13y ago
  Is it true that Dogecoin's value is kept artificially low?
  • wcummings 13y ago
    It's inflationary, coins will never stop being created and they're mined extremely quickly https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/issues/23#issuecomment-33893149 https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/issues/23#issuecomment-...
    • untilHellbanned 13y ago
      its inflationary in the sense that 5% and decreasing new coins are mineable each year after all 100 billion original coins are mined, the actual % inflation is comparable to bitcoin's and less than litecoin's.
  • alexro 13y ago
    There was a problem with multipools exploiting the 'random' block reward - which wasn't truly random - and getting more coins than they normally would. As of now this has been fixed and the price should go up a bit. Also, in about month time the block reward will halve.
    • aestra 13y ago
      Why would fixing that issue cause the price to go up? There was still the same amount of coins created. Also - they apparently fixed it by making the block reward fixed. http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/2014/03/13/dogecoin-forks-again-to-avoid-multipool-exploit/ http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/2014/03/13/dogecoin-forks-aga...
      • bendoernberg 13y ago
        Because more of the mined coins are now going to believers in the currency, rather than mercenary miners immediately selling it for Bitcoin.
        • aestra 13y ago
          But then those coins are sold on an exchange for bitcoins, then the exchange sells them back to believers. They end up in believer's hands anyways.
      • jccooper 13y ago
        Prices are the result of supply vs demand on the exchange market; total supply is a secondary factor. Multipool miners will generally sell for BTC/fiat immediately, creating lots of supply and thus a consistent downward pressure on prices. General miners will be more likely to hold or use instead, creating less sell pressure. By making Doge less profitable to the multipools, they are less likely to mine it, and even if they continue they will get less Doge per block. And that means less supply in the exchanges, which will help the price.
  • dragontamer 13y ago
    Yes, the 100 Billion cap plays a huge role here. With so many Dogecoins flooding the market, it is likely that Doge will remain near worthless forever. Which means it will always be an easy coin to experiment with.
    • sp332 13y ago
      Doge and bitcoin are very easily divisible, so that's not why they're more or less valuable. Bitcoins are rewarded at 250,000,000 satoshis/block!
      • dragontamer 13y ago
        Yes, but both have a practically fixed transaction fee of 0.01 BTC or 0.01 DOGE. BTC transaction fees (by default) cost $0.05 now. DOGE transaction fees are basically free. In its haste for profit-earning, the BTC community has screwed its own coin for "tipping". I ain't paying no 5% tax on $1 tips on the BTC network.
        • aestra 13y ago
          You're way off. The minimum recommended/default transaction fee is .0001 btc. This can change in the future, it is all about what the miners choose to accept, transaction fees are not fixed. For fun I sent a transaction of about .3 btc with a fee of .0.00005 btc. It was confirmed in about a day - or so I thought, because on blockchain.info it says +9 minutes so I don't know if that is the confirmation time or not. The transaction in question - https://blockchain.info/tx/7e2bfff207e5fb6a02890024e790c921e656f6350cce92db402940ef30edb3ac https://blockchain.info/tx/7e2bfff207e5fb6a02890024e790c921e...
          • dragontamer 13y ago
            I missed two zeros on my BTC number, but my dollar amount remains the same. 0.0001 BTC at $500 per BTC == 5 cents per transaction. You can pay less to lower your priority of course, or pay more to raise your priority. Similarly, miners can focus on higher priority transactions to make their profit. Nonetheless, the real effects of deflation are beginning to show. BTC is a worse coin than DOGE for internet tipping. It costs more per transaction and takes longer for those transactions to take place. And as long as the BTC community is blinded by deflationary greed, the problem will remain. Basically, I can transfer money with DOGE within minutes for nearly free (roughly one ten-thousanth of a penny), or I can use BTC to transfer money within hours for $0.05... or within days if I try to be cheaper.
  • GrinningFool 13y ago
    Is it true that bitcoin's value is kept artificially high? Phrased another way: define 'artificially' in this context.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• slipstream- 13y ago
  As a shibe, I always like it when Dogecoin stuff is on hackernews.
  • sp332 13y ago
    Shh... on the internet, no one knows you're a dog!
• kerkeslager 13y ago
  Since Forbes insists on putting an ad wall in front of their content, here's the full text of the article without ads: Dogecoin – Bitcoin’s goofy little brother – has just made history. A member of the Dogecoin community donated 14 million Dogecoins (worth about US$11,000 on the exchanges) to a charity with one single message on Twitter. That tweet, to an automated Twitter-bot, is the most money ever donated or sent directly via a tweet. The Dogecoins were for Doge4Water, a charity set up to help people in Kenya get clean drinking water. The Dogecoins will be converted to real money, and that money will be used to build new wells. The tweet, by an anonymous person who goes by @savethemhood, helped to push the Doge4Water to well past its 40 million Dogecoin (US$30,000) goal. The charity had hoped to reach it by March 22nd, which is World Water Day, and it met that target with a week to spare. This isn’t the first time the Dogecoin community showed its charitable nature. Last month it raised enough money to help get the broke Jamaican Bobsled Team (yes, that one) to the Sochi Winter Olympics. The generosity makes sense, as Dogecoin is positioned to be the “tipping currency” of the Internet. For a crypto-currency that was started as something of a joke, Dogecoin is doing some good, and part of that is through the sheer number of Dogecoin users. By volume, it’s the most-traded crypto-currency in the world. Part of that is because it’s so easy and cheap to get into. A person can buy-in for as little as a dollar (US$1 is worth about 1300 Dogecoins at the time this post went live), and the tipping culture is rife within the community. For example, on the Dogecoin sub-reddit, users are encouraged to tip one another small amounts of Dogecoin for insightful or positive comments along with “upvotes” (the quasi-currency of Reddit). The Dogecoin community has the aim of expanding that “tipping” culture to the rest of the internet by keeping the price of Dogecoin artificially low. Unlike Bitcoin, Dogecoin is not meant to be an investment currency, so much of the shiftiness that Bitcoin users have had to endure likely won’t make its way to the Dogecoin world (though that’s not to say it’s immune). Still, there’s always going to be some controversy with crypto-currencies, and besides being used as a force for good for bobsledders and Kenyan villagers, Dogecoin, with its catch phrases, such as “wow” and “such currency” and “so crypto”, could be a great way to explore what these new virtual currencies can and can’t do, all while maintaining a sense of humor.
  • sp332 13y ago
    Doesn't the adwall go away if you click the link a second time?
• untilHellbanned 13y ago
  Dogecoin has got a great attitude, think Bitcoin would benefit from being more endearing.
  • shitlord 13y ago
    To the average person, Dogecoin is basically Bitcoin without any of the libertarianism. It's kind of hilarious how mad some of the Bitcoin guys get whenever Dogecoin is in the news.
• chadwickthebold 13y ago
  How do they actually go about converting Dogecoin to Dollars? Evertyhing I've read and heard about Dogecoin is that it's kind of a novelty thing, so are there actually people out there who are paying to convert dollars to doge?
  • slipstream- 13y ago
    IIRC there's a couple of exchanges that do DOGE->USD.. but you can also do DOGE->BTC->USD.
  • kattenkorven 13y ago
    There's a growing list of exchanges where you can do this https://www.kraken.com https://www.kraken.com https://www.anxpro.com https://www.anxpro.com https://www.vaultofsatoshi.com https://www.vaultofsatoshi.com https://www.coinmkt.com https://www.coinmkt.com
    • res0nat0r 13y ago
      Can any of these sites actually realize that in actual USD in a reasonable timeframe? How much time and effort and waiting does it take to see $11k in their hands? Or do they have to do transactions of $100/max once per week with a waiting time of 10 days each?
      • skybrian 13y ago
        Apparently the most common approach is to trade for Bitcoin on an exchange and then exchange that for dollars.
        • Aaronontheweb 13y ago
          Can confirm. Kraken is eventually going to enable me to convert it directly into USD, but it still has some regulatory hoops to go through in California at least.
        • untilHellbanned 13y ago
• pkulak 13y ago
  As a Keynesian I love that Dogecoin is the first (that I know of) crypto currency that isn't deflationary. I do wish there was a way to make the things other than mining though. I hate "mining". Such a waste of resources.
  • Aaronontheweb 13y ago
    One of the forms of wealth accumulation that's taken off in the Dogecoin community is tipping - it's been pretty successful on Reddit, 4Chan, and Twitter as a means of rewarding people who create useful / insightful things. The YouTube tipbot is starting to get some traction now too. Here's a post from yesterday that includes some statistics about how much volume in USD is actually distributed on Reddit via the Dogecoin vs. Bitcoin tipbots respectively: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/20ms1i/if_we_want_a_currency_we_have_to_use_it_as_a/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/20ms1i/if_we_want_a...
  • sp332 13y ago
    "Mining" is really solving a block. This means that your computer has verified all the transactions in the block and signed them. As a reward for keeping the transaction record secure, you get some coins. At first, the reward has to be large, to entice people to a new cryptocurrency. But over time, a secure network becomes valuable for itself, and the reward isn't necessary anymore.
    • GrinningFool 13y ago
      > "Mining" is really solving a block. Well.. kind of. Mining is really thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands of people competing to try to solve the same block. The one machine to solve it first gets the reward. (or if in a pool, it's given to the pool.) Over and over again- in the case of dogecoin, once every minute or so. The GP's statement about it being a massive waste of resources is unfortunately true - that's a lot of electricity for any popular coin. > But over time, a secure network becomes valuable for itself, and the reward isn't necessary anymore. Has this actually happened in any case? Logically if there is no value to be gained from maintaining the secure network (eg, 'mining' new transactions into blocks for confirmation), then many fewer people will do so. The fact that it's a secure network is great - but it doesn't seem enough to entice a critical mass of people to maintain it at a cost to themselves.
• arb99 13y ago
  Unrelated to the story (only to the title) but I bet a sponsored tweet from some big celeb could cost more than that. eg https://app.sponsoredtweets.com/tweeters https://app.sponsoredtweets.com/tweeters
• lotsoflove 13y ago
  So generous
• a-priori 13y ago
  Dogecoin is interesting. On one hand, it's all an elaborate joke and everyone involved knows it. On the other hand, it's got a higher transaction volume than its 'serious' cousin Bitcoin, and people occasionally use it to transfer significant amounts of money (e.g. here, and the Jamaican Bobsled Team). The biggest problem a currency has to overcome is the network effect. It's damned hard to bootstrap a currency, to get people to start -- and continue -- to use it instead of some other currency. With conventional currencies, that's typically done by governments requiring taxes to be paid in it. This has the effect of basically guaranteeing that everyone also receives their income in it as well and makes it difficult for another currency to sneak in. Taxes basically anchor the national economy onto the national currency. With crypto-currencies, that's not an option since there's no government to levy taxes. But Bitcoin did something similar through vices: the Silk Road and Satoshi Dice got people using Bitcoin and money into the economy because they wanted to use it for drug trafficking and gambling. Because both of those sites only accepted Bitcoin, and they're either illegal or highly restricted in the normal economy, they acted as an anchor to convince people to adopt Bitcoin and move money into and out of its economy. Once bootstrapped, it's now being used for other, more legitimate, purposes. Dogecoin is bootstrapping itself in a different way, through indiscriminate tipping and charity. It's using this kind of frivolous spending as a way of getting its transaction volume up and bootstrapping exchanges between Dogecoin and Bitcoin and USD. I could see it moving up to micro-transactions of some kind -- something small, perhaps still a joke of some kind, but for transactions (i.e, receiving something in return) rather than donation. Who knows, maybe one day we all woke up, and without realizing it Dogecoin has gone from a joke, to a joke people use for real stuff around the edges, to a real currency with a joke around the edges?
  • trevelyan 13y ago
    This is a very misleading comment. Dogecoin only processes about 0.3 percent of what Bitcoin handles daily, and is far behind in total number of daily transactions: http://bitinfocharts.com/ http://bitinfocharts.com/
    • Spockulus_Rift 13y ago
      it was better than yours, asshat
• sambeau 13y ago
  I'm pretty sure Ellen's selfie tweet cost Samsung more than $11,000.