We bought a beaut of a truck this summer: a second-hand, barn-red Nissan Frontier with a cab that fits four and a cargo bed big enough for stacks of plywood sheets. During the pandemic my partner, Richard, started a business restoring old houses, so he needed a spacious pickup. Our purchase was unremarkable – except that we paid for it with Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that had little value or prominence at the start of the year.
Cryptocurrencies exist only online and Dogecoin is part of a jokey subgenre of these digital currencies, known as memecoins. Whereas Bitcoin, the world’s first cryptocurrency, was created in 2009 with the libertarian goal of circumventing the authority of central banks and nation states, Dogecoin was set up in 2013 as a parody of the ongoing crypto frenzy.
Dogecoin draws its name from an online meme depicting the eponymous “doge” – a stately Shiba Inu lying on a sofa with its paws crossed. The meme is decorated with slogans in broken English such as “so scare”. For no particular reason beyond the meme’s popularity, Dogecoin’s inventors took the name for their own currency. Appropriately enough given its association with trading, the currency is pronounced like the ruler of the mercantilist city-state of Venice in the medieval and Renaissance period.
You might not get why this is amusing, but if you catch even an intimation of humour, then Dogecoin is the currency for you. Irony pervades it. Elon Musk has called Dogecoin “the people’s crypto” and mused that “the most entertaining outcome and the most ironic outcome would be that Dogecoin becomes the currency of Earth.” For a few months this spring, it looked like it was on its way.
“How’s your Doge?” became a running gag
One morning last autumn Richard opened Robinhood, a commission-free stock-trading app that he and others in my household have played like Super Mario over the past 18 months. Robinhood represents another attempt to make playing the markets fun – too much fun, according to regulators in Massachusetts, who claim that the company uses gamification techniques such as whimsical graphics and top-of-the-pops lists of hot securities to make addicts of unsophisticated users, including teenagers.
Richard was enjoying his enslavement to the trading app when he alighted on Dogecoin. He vaguely recalled seeing the sweet-faced, honey-coloured Shiba some years ago, got the joke and decided to go for it.
He spent around $50 buying tens of thousands of Dogecoins for less than a cent a pop. Tell me it doesn’t feel good to have that many units of any currency in your digital pocket, even if those coins are writ on water. By contrast, most people can afford to purchase only a fragment of a Bitcoin, which over the past three months has fluctuated in value between $30,000 and $65,000.
I began to get regular reports from Richard about his growing stash. “How’s your Doge?” became a running gag among our friends. As other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and Bitcoin looked increasingly formidable, Dogecoin stayed cute and laughable – the underdoggy.
Richard stuck with it. Or rather he opted to HODL (hold on for dear life), as the crypto lingo has it. He’s 55, so this new vocabulary unnerves me. But there’s a squeamish delight in “getting into crypto” at a time of life when you’re supposed to be hitting safer stuff – real estate, gold, municipal bonds. Like a motorcycle, crypto keeps you young, where young means moody, desperate and on the cusp of danger.
As Bitcoin looked increasingly formidable, Dogecoin stayed cute and laughable – the underdoggy
At the same time as he was indulging his alter-ego as a day trader, Richard’s restoration business began to take off. Richard felt sheepish driving to the hardware shop in a 2003 minivan with duct-taped doors. He talked about his ideal truck almost as much as he did about Dogecoin – it would carry a bathtub, some barn doors, an antique sofa and sheet upon sheet of plywood.
Dogecoin kept climbing. By April Richard offered to buy $10-worth of Dogecoin for the winner of our Easter egg hunt. My 11-year-old daughter scored around 100 of them (one Dogecoin was now worth around ten cents).
Then things got really crazy. Mark Cuban, an American businessman, started barking about Doge on Twitter. The Dallas Mavericks, the basketball team that Cuban owns, began accepting Dogecoin as payment for tickets. Musk would cryptically tweet “who let the Doge out” or just “$DOGE” along with the rocket emoji. The price zoomed. The doge devotees chanted that this dopey memecoin would go “to da moon”.
It’s hard to say why this coin, among all the others, took off. Dogecoin is a currency backed only by caprice and boredom – and lockdown gave us a plentiful supply of both of these.
Musk was due to host the season finale of “Saturday Night Live” on May 8th. Speculators anticipated that he would introduce Dogecoin to a wider audience and send its value into the stratosphere. Richard was anxious all week that he wouldn’t pick the top: “This is a fool’s game.”
Like a motorcycle, crypto keeps you young, where young means moody, desperate and on the cusp of danger
On the morning of Musk’s appearance we went to a café for breakfast and Richard spent half an hour resting his forehead on the table. He was terrified that the prospective impact of “Saturday Night Live” was being misjudged and the price of Dogecoin was about to plummet, just as it had on April 20th or 4/20 as it was known, another anticipated “Doge day” (420 is code for marijuana – and there just might be some overlap between weed and crypto enthusiasts).
Suddenly Richard left me to my second croissant and strode to the back of the café. I thought he was just pacing and fretting. Instead, he hit Robinhood and cashed out around 15% of his Dogecoin at 69 cents, around $3,000-worth. The price went up by another five cents over the course of the day. Richard couldn’t look.
We nervously tuned into the show that evening. The cast of “Saturday Night Live” was rumoured to be ambivalent about Musk who, as many people see it, has threatened union organisers and spread disinformation about covid-19. Some worry about the environmental effects of cryptocurrencies, too, as the computer power needed to generate more coins burns through a lot of electricity.
There was an uneasy atmosphere from the start of the show. For one, it wasn’t funny. Worse, the price of Dogecoin nosedived, nearly halving in value over the next week. More than two months later it has yet to return to its peak – and it’s nowhere near even the 69 cents Richard cashed out for. He’s rather smug about that.
But I can’t lie. We didn’t quite make enough to buy a truck entirely in Dogecoin. We borrowed the rest in dollars from a bank, the way respectable people do it. And used-car dealerships are not the Dallas Mavericks: they don’t take Doge. Converting Richard’s haul into dollars came with a fee, also in dollars. But we did get a new truck with a mixture of old and new tender.
Richard has ideas for vanity number plates: MUCHWOW? DOGETRUCK? Maybe TODAMOON? When I mention, with as much insouciance as I can muster, that we bought our truck with Dogecoin, young people understand and ask the right questions.
Richard, who still has money in Doge, hasn’t told his hardhat buddies. He says he doesn’t want to alienate colleagues who deal in materials that are dirty, heavy and tangible, rather than coins made of fairy dust.
But I think there’s another reason. He wants to feel that he is a member of an exclusive – if eccentric and possibly delusional – club, to which average people cannot gain admittance unless they have tested their mettle. Just as with his investments, Richard is playing the long game. ■
Virginia Heffernan is a columnist at the LA Times and Wired. She is the author of “Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art” (Simon & Schuster)
ILLUSTRATIONS: MATT RICHARDSON
