from Hacker News

Most Expensive Tweet Ever Sends $11,000 To Kenyan Water Charity Via Dogecoin

by reppic on 3/18/14, 5:25 PM with 77 comments

• by a-priori on 3/18/14, 7:48 PM

  Dogecoin is interesting. On one hand, it's all an elaborate joke and everyone involved knows it. On the other hand, it's got a higher transaction volume than its 'serious' cousin Bitcoin, and people occasionally use it to transfer significant amounts of money (e.g. here, and the Jamaican Bobsled Team).

  The biggest problem a currency has to overcome is the network effect. It's damned hard to bootstrap a currency, to get people to start -- and continue -- to use it instead of some other currency. With conventional currencies, that's typically done by governments requiring taxes to be paid in it. This has the effect of basically guaranteeing that everyone also receives their income in it as well and makes it difficult for another currency to sneak in. Taxes basically anchor the national economy onto the national currency.

  With crypto-currencies, that's not an option since there's no government to levy taxes. But Bitcoin did something similar through vices: the Silk Road and Satoshi Dice got people using Bitcoin and money into the economy because they wanted to use it for drug trafficking and gambling. Because both of those sites only accepted Bitcoin, and they're either illegal or highly restricted in the normal economy, they acted as an anchor to convince people to adopt Bitcoin and move money into and out of its economy. Once bootstrapped, it's now being used for other, more legitimate, purposes.

  Dogecoin is bootstrapping itself in a different way, through indiscriminate tipping and charity. It's using this kind of frivolous spending as a way of getting its transaction volume up and bootstrapping exchanges between Dogecoin and Bitcoin and USD. I could see it moving up to micro-transactions of some kind -- something small, perhaps still a joke of some kind, but for transactions (i.e, receiving something in return) rather than donation. Who knows, maybe one day we all woke up, and without realizing it Dogecoin has gone from a joke, to a joke people use for real stuff around the edges, to a real currency with a joke around the edges?

• by pkulak on 3/18/14, 6:57 PM

  As a Keynesian I love that Dogecoin is the first (that I know of) crypto currency that isn't deflationary. I do wish there was a way to make the things other than mining though. I hate "mining". Such a waste of resources.

• by slipstream- on 3/18/14, 6:25 PM

  As a shibe, I always like it when Dogecoin stuff is on hackernews.

• by untilHellbanned on 3/18/14, 6:31 PM

  Dogecoin has got a great attitude, think Bitcoin would benefit from being more endearing.

• by chadwickthebold on 3/18/14, 6:38 PM

  How do they actually go about converting Dogecoin to Dollars? Evertyhing I've read and heard about Dogecoin is that it's kind of a novelty thing, so are there actually people out there who are paying to convert dollars to doge?

• by sp332 on 3/18/14, 5:34 PM

  Is it true that Dogecoin's value is kept artificially low?

• by sambeau on 3/18/14, 8:27 PM

  I'm pretty sure Ellen's selfie tweet cost Samsung more than $11,000.

• by arb99 on 3/18/14, 7:16 PM

  Unrelated to the story (only to the title) but I bet a sponsored tweet from some big celeb could cost more than that.

  eg https://app.sponsoredtweets.com/tweeters

• by lotsoflove on 3/18/14, 7:33 PM

  So generous

• by kerkeslager on 3/18/14, 6:26 PM

  Since Forbes insists on putting an ad wall in front of their content, here's the full text of the article without ads:

  Dogecoin – Bitcoin’s goofy little brother – has just made history. A member of the Dogecoin community donated 14 million Dogecoins (worth about US$11,000 on the exchanges) to a charity with one single message on Twitter. That tweet, to an automated Twitter-bot, is the most money ever donated or sent directly via a tweet.

  The Dogecoins were for Doge4Water, a charity set up to help people in Kenya get clean drinking water. The Dogecoins will be converted to real money, and that money will be used to build new wells. The tweet, by an anonymous person who goes by @savethemhood, helped to push the Doge4Water to well past its 40 million Dogecoin (US$30,000) goal. The charity had hoped to reach it by March 22nd, which is World Water Day, and it met that target with a week to spare.

  This isn’t the first time the Dogecoin community showed its charitable nature. Last month it raised enough money to help get the broke Jamaican Bobsled Team (yes, that one) to the Sochi Winter Olympics. The generosity makes sense, as Dogecoin is positioned to be the “tipping currency” of the Internet.

  For a crypto-currency that was started as something of a joke, Dogecoin is doing some good, and part of that is through the sheer number of Dogecoin users. By volume, it’s the most-traded crypto-currency in the world. Part of that is because it’s so easy and cheap to get into. A person can buy-in for as little as a dollar (US$1 is worth about 1300 Dogecoins at the time this post went live), and the tipping culture is rife within the community. For example, on the Dogecoin sub-reddit, users are encouraged to tip one another small amounts of Dogecoin for insightful or positive comments along with “upvotes” (the quasi-currency of Reddit).

  The Dogecoin community has the aim of expanding that “tipping” culture to the rest of the internet by keeping the price of Dogecoin artificially low. Unlike Bitcoin, Dogecoin is not meant to be an investment currency, so much of the shiftiness that Bitcoin users have had to endure likely won’t make its way to the Dogecoin world (though that’s not to say it’s immune).

  Still, there’s always going to be some controversy with crypto-currencies, and besides being used as a force for good for bobsledders and Kenyan villagers, Dogecoin, with its catch phrases, such as “wow” and “such currency” and “so crypto”, could be a great way to explore what these new virtual currencies can and can’t do, all while maintaining a sense of humor.