Bitcoin is going through another massive price pump, rising from $19,000 in December 2020 to just over $48,000 earlier this week. Other cryptocurrencies have come along for the ride, and one of the odder beneficiaries has been Dogecoin—heavily promoted on Twitter in the past couple of weeks by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
In the early 2010s “altcoin” scene, lots of Bitcoin fans created their own magical internet money, so they too could get rich for free: copy the Bitcoin software, change a few details, and launch a new coin that you could trade for bitcoins. Dogecoin (pronounced “dozhe-coin”) was a slightly tweaked copy of Litecoin, which was a slightly tweaked copy of Bitcoin. Dogecoin started in December 2013, at the peak of the first big bitcoin bubble.
