Is this how mass adoption occurs? Elon Musk, the world’s richest man at one time, replaced Twitter’s traditional blue bird emblem with a sprite of DOGE, the Shiba Inu dog famed as much for the meme as for the meme coin. Dogecoin increased by almost 40% and has yet to fall. I’ve heard there’s some speculation that DOGE could break through the 10 cent barrier, which is one-tenth as exciting as when so-called proletariat investors of the GameStop era attempted to push dogecoin, sometimes ironically dubbed “the people’s cryptocurrency,” past $1 (it didn’t work).
Dogecoin is reportedly rising in value because investors anticipate Elon Musk would soon implement a permanent dogecoin payment mechanism on Twitter, the microblogging network he overpaid for ($43 billion). Twitter has several million daily active users, many of whom are well-known, and if even a tiny number of them start transacting in DOGE – as a joke or not – it’s not absolutely crazy to expect a price increase. Twitter, however, already includes payment/tipping tools that use the US dollar and the Bitcoin Lightning network. The latter is seldom used, which indicates how frequently the even less generally embraced and trustworthy cryptocurrency, dogecoin, would (or would not) be utilized.
Of course, this is my attempt to interpret cryptocurrency price movements. Prices are the only thing that matters in crypto, yet they are rarely used by investors to determine the projected return on an asset. Instead, crypto prices are nearly a perfect mirror of market mood – or, in layman’s terms, vibe. Is the coronavirus causing the world economy to crash? There are bad vibes. Locked-up workers with extra income become slap-happy day traders? Good feelings. A huge stablecoin experiment gone wrong? There are bad vibes. Is the collapse of US banks exposing Bitcoin’s virtues? There are apparently positive sentiments.
Elon Musk has already influenced the price of dogecoin. The first time this happened, in early 2020, DOGE soared when Tesla founder Elon Musk posted a meme. He must have had a taste of something he appreciates – power via s**tposting – since he repeated identical maneuvers, each time escalating the stakes until the joke wore thin. He commented on a conflict between DOGE traders and the cryptocurrency exchange Binance. His automotive firm, Tesla, would accept DOGE payments. Musk intended to launch DOGE into space using a SpaceX satellite. According to the crypto-skeptical news site Protos, Musk increased the price of DOGE by 4.5% on average over the course of 30 tweets until the end of 2022.
