The previous two editions of this blog were a bit different. I decided to write what I can only describe as love letters to the porn industry and an F you to all the slimy scammers out there. Part of the reason was the fact that we were having a few very quiet weeks in terms news and market activity. You know the rest - the market went up and then plummeted back down, people are panicking and all that jazz.
As always, there’s literally nothing to panic about. The Big Daddy bitcoin is exactly where it was one month ago, both in terms of the price and the market cap. Ethereum is doing a lot worse - it lost $170 in one month, but then again, I think it’ll bounce back sooner or later, especially when all the Ethereum 2.0 solutions are implemented.
I don’t want to focus on the market analysis, predictions and reassuring messages. Instead, this week I will explore and purchase a certain cryptocurrency that’s been around for absolute ages, but I personally never really took it seriously. Amid the entire market plummeting down, it was the only token that actually made gains.
It’s DogeCoin.
Honestly, this is a staggering picture. Almost every single top-20 cryptocurrency is down by double digits, whilst Doge is up by 11%. For several years now, we’ve been hearing that the entire market value is so dependant on Bitcoin and thus its a sign of the market’s immaturity. Could this actually be a turning point?
Personally, I’ve never expected this from a token that was born on Reddit as a joke, has a Shibe Inu as its mascot and was apparently created by Jackson Palmer & Shibetoshi Nakamoto.
Now that it actually happened, I can’t think of a better token to have done that. It’s a truly decentralized token in a sense that no-one controls it, no-one has the ownership, so it actually stands for everything that bitcoin stood for to start of with. Of course, monero, dash and so on are doing the exact same thing, but the main difference is that dogecoin isn’t being so deadly serious about it.
And that’s really important. While there are dozens of startups trying to bring the mass-adoption of crypto closer to reality by promising ease-of-use and user-friendly interfaces, all of them do so in such an overly-professional manner, throwing around big words and promising to disrupt and revolutionise everything and anything that moves. Doge, on the other hand, just seems to be chill, fun and friendly.
What I really like about doge’s website is that it answers all your questions literarily as soon as you open it:
Doesn’t this look ideal for someone who’s completely new to crypto but has been on the Interwebz once or twice?
There’s also another reason for the recent spike in dogecoin’s price. Throughout its existence, the coin was only meant to facilitate transactions, but that is about to change. The developers are currently working on this thing some people refer to as dogethereum - a ‘bridge’ between the Doge ecosystem and Ethereum. They’ve actually had a test a couple days ago and this thing reportedly works.
What are the implications of building a bridge between the two ecosystems? Well, it seems to be a sort of a mutually beneficial symbiosis. Dogecoin will be able to use smart-contracts now, which gives the token bags on bags on bags of new functionality. Ethereum, in turn, will get a currency that’s perhaps as well established as ether, but seemingly a lot less volatile. Win-win.
So, besides being a fun meme coin, dogecoin seems like a great investment right now, so I’m going ahead and buying some. I like to have all my eggs in one basket, so to speak, so the first thing I did was to check Binance and to my surprise there were no Shibes there. Here’s why:
The Doge of Many Hats then elaborates on the issues, read the full thread here if you’re interested. I’m just going to say that one of the issues he talks about was the problem with their 2 factor authentication, which was also a problem for me on several occasions. Still, that and the couple of times when I had to close and open Binance’s Mac clients to refresh orders were the only issues I’ve experienced in the two months I’ve been using it. So, I figured I’ll buy them somewhere else. I clicked ‘Get Dogecoin’ on the official site and saw this:
Let’s get some free moneyz then. The concept sounds simple enough. All I need to do is enter my wallet address and I should get some free DogeCoins. To be honest, this isn’t something I would’ve trusted, ever, if this wasn’t related to Doge. But I’m not leaving any info on the site besides the wallet address, nor am I required to send any money in, so it should be fine.
I downloaded a light wallet, because I have a 6 year old MacBook that struggles when I have more than 10 tabs opened in my browser. I think using it to mine Doge would just result in it exploding, and I really need to write stuff like this and, subsequently, eat.
Just look at this Shibe just sitting there in my dock:
So, I’ve put in my wallet dress and got 0.6 Dogecoins, which is, like, nothing. And I’ll need to do this about 40 more times to actually get them.
So, this is basically where the Dogecoin’s user-friendliness ends. They don’t have any simple one-click way of buying their Tokens. So, I’m going to have to get some bitcoins out of my Binance account and exchange them for the shibes.
ShapeShift, the service that I used to resort to when I needed a quick exchange just announced that they’re going to introduce a membership program and will require «basic» personal information, so I’m going to use Changelly instead, well played ShapeShift! I decided to spend about .006 BTC, which with all the fees amounted to 5,970 Dogecoins, which was like $36 at the time.
This was relatively easy. I’ve copied my dogecoin address, then Changelly generated a BTC address for me to send the 0.006 Bitcoins to. Dealing with Binance withdrawal was a bit more complicated, but it only took me 2 minutes. I copied the Changelly address, Binance then asked me to confirm withdrawal via an SMS and then I was flooded with confirmation emails as if it was my birthday. Everything came through quickly, so I only had to wait for the two networks to sort out the transaction among themselves.
Binance took the longest, but that’s to be expected. I requested a withdrawal at 16:39 and Changelly received the funds at 16:58. Thus, I found out that Binance withdrawals to crypto wallets are done in under 20 minutes. My dogecoins were released just 10 minutes later and appeared in my wallet straight away.
As you can see though, the exchange rate must’ve changed while the transaction was happening and I ended up with 5,465 DOGE instead of the 5,970 I was meant to receive in the first place, which isn’t doing Changelly any favours. I opened the trade at one rate and it was closed at a different one. Not cool either - will have to find a better way in the future.
Still, I’m now a proud holder of 5,5 DOGE coins and I hope to see shibes fly TO THE MOON.
