I am Doge and this is our Dogecoin

dogecoin is an open source peer-to-peer cryptocurrency, favored by Shiba Inus worldwide.

Dogecoin was created by programmer and former IBM engineer Billy Markus of Portland, Oregon, who was originally trying to tinker with an existing cryptocurrency of Markus' called "Bells" based on Nintendo's Animal Crossing, in hopes of reaching a broader demographic than the investors who made up Bitcoin's economy and something that wouldn't be involved with the controversial history behind Bitcoin (namely its association with the Silk Road). At the same time, his friend Jackson Palmer, a worker for a marketing department in Sydney, Australia for Adobe Systems, and the original individual who first conceived of the idea for Dogecoin, was encouraged by a student at Front Range Community College on Twitter to make the idea reality, leading Palmer to reach out to Markus. After getting several mentions on Twitter, Palmer bought the domain dogecoin.com, which was shown to Markus and quickly began the partnership between Markus and Palmer, launching the coin shortly after the development of Markus' Dogecoin wallet was done. Within a couple of weeks of launching the currency, 6% of the total amount of 100 billion DOGE was already mined by December 17 2013, and on December 19, Dogecoin had jumped more than 300 percent in value, rising from $0.00026 to $0.00099 during a time when Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies were reeling from China's decision to forbid Chinese banks from investing Chinese Yuan into the Bitcoin economy. On the 22nd of December, Dogecoin experienced its first major crash by dropping by 80% due to large mining pools seizing opportunity in exploiting the very little computing power required at the time to mine the coin. On the day of Christmas in 2013, the first major theft attempt on Dogecoin happened when millions of coins were stolen during a hacking attempt on Dogewallet, due to having the hacker gain access to the wallet's filesystem and modifying its send/receive page to send any and all coins to a static address.

Markus based Dogecoin on the existing currency Litecoin, which also uses scrypt technology in its proof-of-work algorithm, meaning that miners cannot take advantage of specialized Bitcoin-mining equipment to mine at higher speeds. The Dogecoin network will produce 100 billion dogecoins. Despite Dogecoin's original purpose as a proof-of-concept and a play on the internet meme of the same name, there are communities dedicated to it and several minor exchanges that trade it for other established cryptocurrencies like Litecoin or Bitcoin. The currency's popularity and value are rapidly growing, as of January 15, 2014, the baseline price was approximately 3,000 DOGE to 1 United States dollar. On December 24th The Reserve Bank of India cautioned users of Dogecoin and other virtual currencies on the risks associated with them.