Dogecoin: The Tippers – Part 3
On how a cryptocurrency funded a bobsled team and a race car driver
Within a month of Dogecoin’s launch, over 35,000 people joined the subreddit community. Within two months, the number of Dogecoin transactions surpassed the total combined transactions of all other cryptocurrencies. Dogecoin was hot stuff in the crypto world.
These early members of the Dogecoin community — which I’ll call “tippers”— loved the coin as a cultural commodity. A 2013 Reddit comment from @improbablydrunklw captured this sentiment: “A profitable joke currency, one where laughter and fun is worth more than charts and graphs.” Users like @improbablydrunklw embraced the “fun and friendly” parody mentality set forth by the coin’s founders and complemented it with the goal of supporting each other in the community.
In turn, these individuals found a use for Dogecoin: Small-scale social media tipping and philanthropy.
Members of the Reddit community could send Dogecoin as a “tip” for a comment made on a forum. Because Dogecoin had such a low unit price compared to other cryptocurrencies (in its first two years, Dogecoin’s value often hovered around two-hundredths of a cent), a person could tip a lot of Dogecoin for very little money. It was common for people to tip 50 DOGE (~$0.10) or 100 DOGE (~$0.20) for a funny or insightful Reddit comment. Tipping was about supporting the community; it functioned as a “like button” supercharged by financial buy-in.
Founder Billy Markus observed how Dogecoin became “just about having fun and tipping,” and Reddit user @Halio1984 wrote: “Dogecoin wants you to give it away and have fun with it!” Reddit threads were created just to share tips amongst the community: One from 2013, titled “The tip tipping tip tip of many tipping tips thread,” got 261 comments with people tipping each other for no reason than generosity. These threads proliferated in the early years of r/Dogecoin.
Tippers loved Dogecoin for its community, and tipping reinforced this community. It was a positive feedback loop. This mentality is captured in a Reddit posted titled “Tipping Dogecoin be like,” which included a gif of people passing Dogecoin-labeled water bottles back and forth around a table. For tippers, the currency’s rationale for existing was self-referential. Dogecoin was good for Dogecoin. It built its own economy centered on community and fun.
This tipping phenomenon made a real difference in the world, too. In 2014, the community donated $25,000 to a service dog organization in the UK and $30,000 to support clean drinking water in Kenya. Most notably, inspired by the 1993 film Cool Runnings about the Jamaican bobsled team, the Dogecoin community funded the Jamaican bobsled team to compete in the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. Within two days, the community raised around 26M DOGE — equivalent to ~$30,000 — to support the Jamaican team’s trip to Sochi.
Following this fundraising effort, the Dogecoin community raised $55,000 to support NASCAR driver Josh Wise’s race at the Talladega Superspeedway, who did not have prior funding to compete in the race. The community raised the funds in eight days, and Wise competed in a Dogecoin-wrapped car.
In the words of Liam Butler, head of the Dogecoin Foundation (created to organize these philanthropic efforts), Dogecoin was “the community currency of the Internet.” These efforts brought together the Dogecoin values of community and humor by funding service dogs with a dog-themed cryptocurrency, a bobsled team because of a movie, and an “underdog” NASCAR driver.
Dogecoin was a fun and do-good crypto community. In 2013, journalist Patrick McGuire wrote “tipping fellow Dogecoin enthusiasts when they make a funny Dogecoin picture or video” was the only real use for Dogecoin. At the time, this was true, but the tippers’ relation to the coin would be complicated in the late 2010s. In May 2017, one Dogecoin tipper wrote in a Reddit post: “We were the coin that made fun of people looking for a quick profit. Over time, it turned into everything I hate about crypto.”
A new group of users fueled this transformation: The pump and dumpers. More on them in the next post.
Sources
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This is all very interesting -- I really know very little about cryptocurrency, so thank you!