Full daily beast quote

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I agree with the naysayers - in fact, I pretty much *am* a naysayer -
but somewhere in the middle between "cryptocurrencies are the future"
and "cryptocurrencies are neckbeard monopoly money" is the truth. The
fact is is that all Bitcoin, Litecoin and my personal love Dogecoin
boils down to magic numbers in the ether - they don't have any value
to them except the value other participants in the game assign to
them. But by the value assigned to them by those participants suddenly
we have something which is "a big magic number" assigned a value that
can be converted (albeit through a fairly complex process) into "real"
value (Euro, USD, Goats) to people.

So, of *course* there are naysayers - when my mom called me up and
asked me about it, I had to stop laughing at several points - I had to
explain to her that in the end, my computer way rummaging through a
pile of numbers, looking for a magical number, and if I get a magical
number, someone else on the internet could or would assign it a value
they felt it was "worth" and give that to me.

After some silence on the end of the line, she said "That doesn't make
any sense." And fundamentally, she's right - but then, that gets into
the debates about economics and the value of "real" currency. What
*really* defines the value of the dollar? What about the Euro?

When I was a kid - I collected comic books: I thought I would make
hundreds of dollars from them - but I realized early on, if you have a
commodity or thing in your hand, its only value is what someone will
pay you for it, or what you assign to it yourself. The same applies to
cryptocurrencies and if you take a moment to do the mental gymnastics
to compare say, Dogecoin and Bitcoin to the comic book market - you
ironically begin to see the same type of volatility we see today;
essentially a coin/comic supposedly worth $100 today, might be worth
nothing tomorrow - because the value in the item is only gained by
what people *will pay you for it*.

So Dogecoin - I never mined for bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency.
The reason my imagination was sparked by Dogecoin is that the
community, the creators and everyone involved treated it with the
levity it deserved. A Dogecoin is a magic number "found" by someone's
computer - and the Doge community treats it like that. Instead of
treating it like Serious Currency and Looking for Millions in Venture
Capital - we're all busy tipping random people on the internet with it
as a way of saying "hey, thanks" or "have some fun". On Reddit, we
spend most of our time tipping each other for funny images and
insightful comments. That's the core difference: Doge might have some
value (meaning, you can sell it on an exchange and convert it to
bitcoin and then sell it for dollars) but the biggest value is
generated by the community of people *having fun* and sharing with one
another and helping each other.

This is why it's taken off so well: the community around a technology
is what makes it accessible; obviously it helps that we've got a meme,
but fundamentally, when you have a super helpful, fun, and really not
serious community of people willing to make things easier for you,
help you along and more it lowers the barrier to entry so suddenly the
scary "cryptocurrency silk road lol" world becomes something slightly
different.

As for Coinye - well - maybe a good idea - but they launched it as a
pure marketing jump after seeing the success of Dogecoin, with some
laudable marketing goals "bring it to the masses" but they hyped it
enough and then mislead the cryptocurrency communities. Most of the
people I spoke to agreed - it was a classic pump and dump: hype,
pre-mine the coin, launch, cash out. There's been more than a few
"altcoins" that have done this. And it remains to be seen if Coinye
(especially with lawyers now involved) will be much more than another
PR black eye on the cryptocurrency community at large.

At the end of the day - I'll keep tipping Doge to random people on
twitter - senators, coworkers, my wife because it's *fun*. One day
doge might hit the goal of a moon landing (inside joke) but for now,
it's fun, it's funny - and it's at least getting people to participate
in some form in the cryptocurrency "world".

Just don't invest real money. Please