Doged a Bullet
This wooden sign nailed to a telephone pole near our hotel struck me as weird. "It[']s easy to buy Doge," it says. Which may be true, but wooden-sign marketing seems like a strange way to go about saying it.
In case you don't know, Doge -- or, more formally, Dogecoin -- is one of those electronic cryptocurrencies, fake computer money that people manufacture on vast collections of energy-sucking computer servers that they can use to "disrupt the system" ... or whatever. I think they were originally invented for international money laundering, trading between untraceable internet bank accounts (not connected to any actual bank) used by drug smugglers, human traffickers, and terrorist arms dealers, but over time they evolved into excuses for tech bros to feel superior to everybody else on the internet. Twenty-something white boys flocked to crypto like Boomer Glenn Beck fans gobbling up gold, and everybody thought they were going to get spectacularly rich. There are a bunch of different cryptocurrencies. the most famous being Bitcoin, and each and every one of them is a big Ponzi scheme doomed to collapse.
As you might be gathering, I am not a fan of cryptocurrencies.
Doge marries cryptocurrency with another of my great irritations, real-life Bond villain Elon Musk. Musk is the current King of the Tech Libertarians and, as I've mentioned on these pages a few times, Emperor of the Internet Snake Oil Tycoons. Other than ignoring actual science enough to pretend he's going to colonize Mars sometime next week, his primary goal in life is to troll people on the internet. He's currently accomplishing this by pretending to buy Twitter -- Spoiler Alert: That deal's not happening -- but he trolled people in the past by latching onto Dogecoin. Who knows why. Probably because its logo involved a funny looking dog. But he spent a few months talking up Dogecoin, and all his legion of internet tech bro acolytes lapped it up and dropped a bunch of money into Dogecoin investments. This drove up the price of Dogecoin for a while, so that it briefly was worth about 64 cents in US dollars. This never put it anywhere near the value of Bitcoin, which topped out above $64,000, but 64 cents isn't nothing.
Now Dogecoin is worth 6.2 cents. Still not nothing. But a lot closer to it.
That's the thing about cryptocurrencies. They're not based on anything other than hype, and they have no intrinsic value. Any commodity is only based on what you can talk people into paying for it, but at least the Boomers have a pretty chunk of metal to look at if the price of gold collapses. Dogecoin dopes only have the ones and zeros on their computer screens.
Doged a Bullet
This wooden sign nailed to a telephone pole near our hotel struck me as weird. "It[']s easy to buy Doge," it says. Which may be true, but wooden-sign marketing seems like a strange way to go about saying it.
In case you don't know, Doge -- or, more formally, Dogecoin -- is one of those electronic cryptocurrencies, fake computer money that people manufacture on vast collections of energy-sucking computer servers that they can use to "disrupt the system" ... or whatever. I think they were originally invented for international money laundering, trading between untraceable internet bank accounts (not connected to any actual bank) used by drug smugglers, human traffickers, and terrorist arms dealers, but over time they evolved into excuses for tech bros to feel superior to everybody else on the internet. Twenty-something white boys flocked to crypto like Boomer Glenn Beck fans gobbling up gold, and everybody thought they were going to get spectacularly rich. There are a bunch of different cryptocurrencies. the most famous being Bitcoin, and each and every one of them is a big Ponzi scheme doomed to collapse.
As you might be gathering, I am not a fan of cryptocurrencies.
Doge marries cryptocurrency with another of my great irritations, real-life Bond villain Elon Musk. Musk is the current King of the Tech Libertarians and, as I've mentioned on these pages a few times, Emperor of the Internet Snake Oil Tycoons. Other than ignoring actual science enough to pretend he's going to colonize Mars sometime next week, his primary goal in life is to troll people on the internet. He's currently accomplishing this by pretending to buy Twitter -- Spoiler Alert: That deal's not happening -- but he trolled people in the past by latching onto Dogecoin. Who knows why. Probably because its logo involved a funny looking dog. But he spent a few months talking up Dogecoin, and all his legion of internet tech bro acolytes lapped it up and dropped a bunch of money into Dogecoin investments. This drove up the price of Dogecoin for a while, so that it briefly was worth about 64 cents in US dollars. This never put it anywhere near the value of Bitcoin, which topped out above $64,000, but 64 cents isn't nothing.
Now Dogecoin is worth 6.2 cents. Still not nothing. But a lot closer to it.
That's the thing about cryptocurrencies. They're not based on anything other than hype, and they have no intrinsic value. Any commodity is only based on what you can talk people into paying for it, but at least the Boomers have a pretty chunk of metal to look at if the price of gold collapses. Dogecoin dopes only have the ones and zeros on their computer screens.