Last July the "Dogecoin Challenge" was trending on TikTok.
The intricate rules of the "challenge" involved TikTok users buying Dogecoin, then posting about it...that's it. And the stated goal of this challenge was to push the joke cryptocurrency — based on a meme from 2013 — to a value of one dollar.
Given the fact that there are currently around 113 billion DOGE in circulation — compared to less than 20 million Bitcoin — and that the value, even after doubling, remained a fraction of a penny, this goal was actually quite lofty. So lofty, in fact, that I didn't take it seriously.
In an article I wrote at the time, I argued that the whole weird story was best understood as a joke. That the $1 price target was "an unlikely — and probably not that serious — goal."
I even joked that it was part of an effort to make Baby Boomers so confused and alienated that their brains would melt. It was a silly meme built on a silly meme, and the idea that anyone was actually trying to get buy-a-boat rich off of Dogecoin seemed like a stretch.
That was before Gamestop and WallStreetBets proved the strength of the meme economy in January, helping to drive the value of Dogecoin past 1 cent, then five cents, then 10 cents... And now Dogecoin is proving that strength once again.
This morning the value of a single Doge in the coin marketplace exceeded 60 cents per DOGE — more than 200 times its value a year ago — putting the total value of circulating Doge at nearly $70 billion.
To put this in perspective, the global market for leisure boats was around $41 billion in 2020. So, not only can Dogecoin investors buy boats, they could theoretically buy all the boats, with enough left over to buy several thousand private islands to go visit on those boats.
The price of a DOGE has fluctuated since then but remains above 50 cents at the time of writing, and it seems increasingly doubtful that it won't continue to rise. And with Tesla CEO/Dogefather Elon Musk set to host SNL for some reason, it seems doubtless that the aggressive upward trend of Dogecoin will continue, at least long enough to reach $1.
Hell, it could pass that by the time I finish writing this sentence. It could be at $10 by Saturday. If Elon Musk says, "Such Crypto. Much wow" on Saturday Night Live, Dogecoin could be the de facto global currency by June — with a loaf of bread selling for 0.001 DOGE.
To put it simply, I was wrong about Dogecoin. I was so patently wrong that I've lost all concept of reality, and I genuinely don't know what to think anymore.
Is money even real? And if it's all a weird shared delusion, why is it so important? Why are we forced to slave away for scraps of fantasy paper that will soon be replaced by a digitally-gilded image of an aging Shiba Inu?
Why is survival dependent on the arbitrary value ascribed to drawings of dead presidents and old masonic memes of pyramids with eyes? Why not update it with a meme that embraces chaos and absurdity?
I am ready for it now. Now that I have loosed my grip on the "sanity" that told me people would never invest tens of billions of real, need-'em-to-live bucks in a stale joke, I can embrace my inner boomer, allow my brain to melt in contact with a culture it no longer comprehends, and invest my life savings in Dogecoin.
Why not? There's nothing to lose but the last frayed tendrils of coherent thought tying me to a dying reality. #HODLer #ToTheMoon.
There is no truth anymore. There is only DOGE.