Dogecoin Is Rising Because It Can

TikTok is making news for all kinds of reasons, and all of them stem from the perception that it’s basically a tool of the Communist Party of China and the Chinese government.

For our purpose, what matters is “eyeballs” — as in, TikTok is attracting a lot of content-seeking viewers. And, this week, a lot of those eyeballs were after a certain cryptocurrency named for an internet meme.

So, there’s definitely a through-line about “provenance” to be tugged and or developed here. For now, let’s focus on the fact that, as we tweeted July 10, “After a week of viral videos on TikTok, #Dogecoin (#DOGE, Rated “C+”) is up 35% and 2,000% in volume…”

What’s going on? Well, Juan Villaverde answered that question in a recent installment of CryptoBytes. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of that comment…

Jackson Palmer is the creator of the Dogecoin. Just like the meme it was based on,  it was created as a joke. It was never supposed to do as well as it did.

It’s basically a clone of Bitcoin that is merge-mined with Litecoin, so you can’t even mine it by itself for security reasons.

When we were developing our ratings, Doge didn’t suck. I’m not saying it rated great, but it didn’t suck. And no matter how we sliced and diced our model, Doge always came out as a decent project.

So, we had to change our view on it. It was very controversial when we came out and did not give Doge a bad rating.

People started piling on us: “Oh, what are you doing? You don’t know what you’re talking about. Doge is supposed to be a joke.”

And I made the point that, look, it’s a decentralized asset. Doge is whatever people want it to be because it’s decentralized and has no owner.

And, so, if people want to take it seriously, and they want to own it, and they want to transact with it, and they want to make jokes, and they want to buy it …

They’re free to do so, and no one — not even its creator — can stop them.

Best wishes,

Juan and Bruce