Dogecoin DOGE

Yes. About ten thousand new DOGE are created every minute with no end date, roughly five billion a year on top of the 140-odd billion that exist. The yearly addition shrinks as a percentage of the pile, so inflation falls over time, but there is no cap and never has been. It is the single most important difference between DOGE and bitcoin, and the one least mentioned by people promoting it.

Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, in 2013, as satire. Neither kept a meaningful fortune from it: Markus has said he sold his coins years before the mania for roughly the price of a used car, and Palmer left crypto entirely and became one of its sharpest critics. The coin that made others rich made its creators a cautionary tale about timing, which is somehow the most Dogecoin fact of all.

Because attention is the asset's fuel and he holds the world's largest attention hose. His tweets, his hosting of an American comedy show in 2021, and rumours about his companies accepting DOGE have each produced double-digit price swings within hours. No filing, no product, no earnings: a post. Whatever you think of that, it is the honest mechanics of this market, and it cuts identically in both directions.

A rotating cast of merchants accept it, from some of Musk's company merchandise to various online retailers and tipping services, and payment processors will convert it for shops that do not want to touch it directly. It is genuinely cheap and quick to send. Honest context: the overwhelming majority of DOGE activity is trading, not shopping, and always has been.

Alongside Litecoin, through a design called merged mining: since 2014 the two share the same mining work, so machines securing Litecoin secure Dogecoin at no extra cost. This bolted a serious security budget onto what began as a joke and is a big part of why it has never suffered a takeover attack despite its value. It also means Dogecoin's security is, in practice, a passenger on Litecoin's.

It is fine, in the way a reliable old hatchback is fine. It moves value cheaply, confirms quickly, and has run for over a decade without a serious failure, which beats many far grander projects. Development is modest and slow, mostly maintenance by volunteers. Nobody chooses DOGE for the technology; it works well enough that the technology does not stop them either.

The code is family; the philosophy is opposite. Bitcoin is engineered scarcity aimed at being taken maximally seriously: capped supply, ten-minute blocks, institutional custody. Dogecoin is uncapped, minute-by-minute, and constitutionally refuses to be serious. Bitcoin's bet is that discipline creates value; Dogecoin's observed reality is that community and celebrity can too, for as long as they last.

A whole DOGE costs pennies, so no one has ever needed to ask. It divides into a hundred million units each regardless. The relevant discipline with DOGE is not the unit, it is the total: decide what you are comfortable seeing evaporate in a bad week, because weeks like that are a recurring feature of its history.

No. The £85,000 FSCS protection is for bank deposits and does not cover crypto anywhere. An exchange failure leaves you an unsecured creditor holding a claim, not coins. For an asset this volatile, held mostly in small amounts, the practical advice writes itself: treat it like cash in a fairground wallet, an amount whose loss would annoy rather than hurt.

Attention, honestly measured: social volume, celebrity involvement, and whether payment integrations are real or rumoured, because rumours have moved this coin more than releases. Watch the inflation arithmetic too when comparing any price to its past: five billion new coins a year means the same market value buys a lower price per coin every year. And treat every DOGE price prediction as entertainment, which is at least in the spirit of the thing.