Looking at the Meme economy from the history of Dogecoin

As we have seen through the crazy rise of Gremplin’s “CrypToadz” and other projects, in general, the community is the main catalyst behind the success or collapse of various protocols, dApps, or in Gremplin’s example, many people are now jokingly Think of it as “Jpegs without liquidity” (NFT).

But there is another factor, a well-known glue, that helps to consolidate and strengthen these communities while also spreading their ideas to the wider world. Memes. 

Many people don’t know that the origin of Meme and its formal theme (called memetics) can be traced back to the 1970s. It is particularly noteworthy that Richard Dawkins mentioned Meme in his 1976 book “The Selfish Gene” (The Selfish Gene), whose role is different from the current association with social media. Quite simply, Dawkins’ concept of the term meme is “as a unit of cultural information”, which is the cultural equivalent of genes. Dawkins further elaborated on the meaning of the word:

“… Examples of Meme are tunes, ideas, buzzwords, clothing fashion, methods of making jars, or building arches. Just as genes jump from one body to another through sperm or eggs to spread themselves in the gene pool, Meme uses Jumping from brain to brain spreads itself in the Meme library. The term Meme can be said to mimic genes.” 

Generally speaking, traditional thinking interprets Dawkins’ Meme as “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads between people.” After decades, Meme is now more or less known as interesting, extensive and infectious online content, such as captioned pictures or videos. 

However, when it comes to cryptoeconomics, Meme plays a dual and (sometimes) polarizing role. On the one hand, some purists criticize meme-centric tokens, believing that they invalidate the potential power and purpose of decentralized technology. On the other hand, playful humor has an undeniable value, and this humor exists on the surface of a subject that most people consider intimidating and vague. 

We can see similar concepts and strategies reflected in the methods of respected comedians like Dave Chappelle. Behind the funny stories about Rick James or Mickey Mouse in Disney World is cruel, sometimes the disturbing truth about our social and historical discourse as human beings. Similarly, we can argue that encrypted Meme initially attracted audiences with its indiscretion, while also retaining deeper subtext and meaning through the technology and culture surrounding them. By doing so, it can be used as a well-disguised “step into the door” strategy for those who will be exhausted, mentally exhausted or deprived of their rights to learn more about the necessity of these emerging technologies.

To better understand the inherent power of Meme in attracting audiences and increasing adoption rates, we can consider the history and evolution of DOGE tokens.

DOGE history

As we all know, DOGE was originally an easy joke between co-founders Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer. When the overall seriousness of Bitcoin penetrates into the global cryptocurrency discussion, creating a “fun and friendly Internet currency” seems absurd, just like a breath of fresh air. People who want to easily mint and buy and sell things that cost less than a cent can do so with little risk. As a result (or possibly a direct effect of these factors), DOGE reportedly had more than 1 million visits to its website about a month after its launch. Within two weeks of the project’s launch on December 6, 2013, the r/Dogecoin Reddit channel had more than 19,000 users, and the price of DOGE soared by 300%, even though China announced that it would ban payment companies from processing Bitcoin. 

Community value and support

Another factor in the success and popularity of the DOGE token is people’s long-existing love for the token mascot, the popular Meme of the Japanese Shiba Inu ” dog e”, with the absurdity of “very wow” and “so tired”. Famous for the phrase. This Meme was originally created in 2010 after Japanese kindergarten teacher Atsuko Sato posted several photos of her adopted Shiba Inu Kabosu on her personal blog. In these photos, there is a strange shot of Kabosu sitting on the sofa, raising his eyebrows while staring at the camera. After publishing articles in The Verge and other media, Sato’s Kabosu was identified as the original Shiba Inu depicted in Meme, and the images and content became more popular on the Internet.


Photo taken by Atsuko Sato

We can observe that by linking tokens with mascots that already have more and more supporters, Jackson and Billy are able to use the psychological factors of social identity to make people feel emotional about Meme itself. In addition, although the nature of DOGE is absurd, as if it is a fork of Lucky tokens and has a total supply of 100 billion, after being attacked and criticized in 2014, DOGE proved that it does have practical utility, and the community supports the currency. .

Some examples include raising $30,000 in a few hours to help the Jamaican bobsled team participate in the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. Another DOGE community-driven project called “Doge4Kids” involved a successful donation of US$30,000 to the 4 Paws For Ability charity, which aims to help provide service dogs to children with special needs.


Dogecoin sponsors NASCAR driver Stefan Parsons

With all of this in mind, when it comes to web3 adoption and awareness, Meme coins like DOGE can also help contribute more elements. The most common of these are precious assets of time and attention. Affinity Snoop Dog, Lil Yachty and Mia Khalifa especially prominent celebrities such as this – not to mention the most famous Elon Musk .

Time and attention-further adoption

In order to show how Elon’s support of DOGE can help the further adoption and awareness of the crypto ecosystem, we can consider an analogy with YouTube.

In 16 years (since its establishment on February 14, 2005), YouTube as a platform has gained approximately 2.3 billion users worldwide. Its users watch more than 1 billion hours of video every day and produce 720,000 hours of content every day in more than 100 countries. From this perspective, one billion hours is approximately 115,000 years. 720,000 hours is equivalent to 82.13552 years. This is what Youtube produces every day.

The diversity of content on YouTube is one of the many reasons for its popularity over the years. More importantly, all of this is interconnected on a single platform, supervised by an algorithm designed to preserve the only important things-audience time, energy, and attention.

According to Google’s statistics, the two main reasons for viewers to watch YouTube are “relaxed” and “feeling interesting.” But from YouTube’s point of view, this is not important. The only thing that matters is that they have been watching. Suppose we compare YouTube to the web3 platform and cryptocurrency as a whole network. A similar argument can be made that people like Musk are spreading Meme coins equivalent to the amount of “Internet daily” editing, and as a result, more important assets are traded. Time, public attention and awareness. No matter what method is adopted, the media will discuss the discourse of events such as Musk’s appearance and DOGE. Saturday Night Live has always helped to transfer decentralized digital assets to the spirit of the times, and in the past, it would be at the edge of a dedicated niche or subset.

Build from scratch

As mentioned earlier, Meme coin is attractive due to its inherent affordability, which gives the community an opportunity to align with the popular theme of bottom-up cryptocurrency construction. Although this concept has been reflected in Bitcoin’s pre-existing divisible system called “satoshis”, the use of “sats” to display smaller and larger denominations of US dollars will still cause a lot of confusion for most people. However, it is possible for Meme coins like Doge or Shiba Inu to own and use a “complete token” by providing opportunities for a wider audience without risking the loss of life savings or over-exploitation based on pure speculation. Position. However, the downside is that this wider public accessibility also provides the possibility for inexperienced traders and investors, who later become victims of frantic bidding or price manipulation. In essence, having 100 million Meme coins may seem more attractive or exciting,

“The people’s cryptocurrency”-mocking traditional systems

When analyzing the intentions of public figures like Musk, not many people will consider another underlying factor of Meme’s power, their inherent ability to mock traditional systems. If anything, Richard Nixon’s actions to end the exchange of US dollars for gold and implement wage/price control in 1971 only further highlighted the innate plasticity of currency as a tool, and fiat currency is a tool built according to the interests of centralized giants.

Meme tokens skyrocketed because cryptocurrency representatives rejected Wall Street and they built their own meme

Although I don’t usually buy them, it’s pointless to hate them

In the long run, they are undoubtedly more meaningful harbingers of cryptocurrency adoption.

iamDCinvestor, October 27, 2021

From this perspective, it can be said that Meme coins like Doge are completely the opposite of the traditional system-developed and supported by digital natives to exchange and share value online. There is no malicious incentive or manipulation intention for ordinary Meme (regardless of whether there is an associated token or not). In this sense, although the Federal Reserve may remind people of trillions of dollars, but (although it is still only a hypothesis), Musk also used the example of Doge to prove that the current system can be replaced by something equally ridiculous. 

Follow-up effect

Reflecting on the above examples, it is not difficult to understand that Meme and related tokens may represent the web3 culture just like Satoshi Nakamoto himself. More importantly, as the serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and essayist Balaji Srinivasan cites, Meme is creating a gradual economy to complement or evolve into an emerging subtype of the NFT field.

To quote Balaji: “The Meme economy will become a reality. Meme creators will make NFTs. Timestamps provide priority proof. Memers become millionaires. Risky art becomes uncensorable, monetizable, and not controlled by the government. “Maybe all of this will be explored in the future.

Posted by:CoinYuppie，Reprinted with attribution to:https://coinyuppie.com/looking-at-the-meme-economy-from-the-history-of-dogecoin/

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