 Hello, baby. You're watching The Daily Decrypt. I'm your host Amanda. Today's episode is brought to you by The Miracle. You say doggie coin. I say dogecoin. He says dog coin and she says what the hell are you talking about? Whatever you call it, the two-year-old cryptocurrency, which was based on a 2013 meme of someone's cute dog, has the sixth highest market cap of all cryptocurrencies today. How did this come to be? Let's start with some background. Late in the year of the doge meme 2013, programmer Billy Marcus and marketer Jackson Palmer decided to get together and launch a new cryptocurrency, and they called it dogecoin. The already popular meme featured a Shiba Inu dog with colorful broken English phrases posted all around its head. Shortly after its launch, the cryptocurrency achieved a market cap of $4 million. Over its lifetime, it's been as high as $70 million, and currently sits at about $17 million. The currency is a fork of lucky coin, which itself was a fork of litecoin, and uses a proof-of-work script mining algorithm. The currency currently runs on 520 network nodes around the world. Current dogecoin developers and their funding sources are unclear to me, however the latest commit to the dogecoin codebase was three months ago. There are currently 103 billion dogecoins, and they're created at a rate of 10,000 new coins every one minute. This coin creation rate is set to continue indefinitely, which means that over 5 billion new dogecoins will be mined each year. So perhaps it's not surprising that each dogecoin is worth one-tenthousandth of $1. But sheaves don't seem to mind that being the name that community members call one another affectionately in homage to doge the Shiba Inu dog. And speaking of community, it just might be the single best selling point of this remarkably successful currency. Users of dogecoin are known for being nice. One visit to the moderately popular dogecoin subreddit, for example, or any of the dogecoin-related Twitter accounts will reveal people that are only too happy to tip, too happy to help, and constantly cracking jokes. Take this joke that was snuck into the Wikipedia article on dogecoin, for example. Dogecoin stakeholders are also no strangers to marketing, as over the past two years they've gotten themselves global exposure through things like sponsoring the Jamaican bobsled Olympic team, donating to charity water, and sponsoring the driver of a NASCAR race. Within the last 24 hours, what some call a joke-based currency has actually had a higher trading volume than more serious currencies like purecoin, bit shares, and stellar. What is the potential market size of people seeking fun and friendliness in their currency? As of today, it seems to be about $17 million worth, and time will tell if there's any more. Today's episode has been brought to you by The Merkle, where you'll find charts, tutorials, analyses, and news all in one convenient place. You can check out more at TheMerkle.com. Listen to our podcast on the LTV network if you like, and have a good day.