The Beginning of the Dogecoin (DOGE) Journey
Once upon a time, I was a poor lonely Shibe. I had no Dogecoins. 😥 But then, I learned about Doge and the entire world of Cryptocurrency. I learned all these new terms like mining, hash rate, wallet, and TO THE MOON! Some of these were more DOGE specific, but others were more general to crypto. I had heard a little bit about Bitcoin (BTC) of course, but at the time I thought it was mostly a scam and something people used to buy drugs on things like Silk Road and Reddit. I know, my ignorance is showing, but hey, you got to start somewhere and this is where I started.
It was the fall/winter of 2014. It was the first big "pump" that I think there ever was in Dogecoin. I think it hit around $0.0016. Not even two-tenths of a penny! There was a lot of hype and Reddit was stacked with claims of "going to the moon!" This peak happened around February 2014. And you know why it "peaked" back then? Well, believe it or not, it was because lots of Shibes decided to send the Jamaican bobsled team to the Olympics. You can't make this up (in case you thought I was lying: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/20/jamaican-bobsled-team-raises-dogecoin-winter-olympics). Not even a Disney movie featuring John Candy can hold a torch to this Cinderella story (well, actually it can because Cool Runnings is awesome, but I digress). DOGE became known as the generous crypto at the time. It was also around then that the now-defunct Coinye Coin was released to the world (evidently it may still be alive: http://www.coinye.net/).
Let the mining begin!
At the time, I had received a top-of-the-line gaming laptop from Best Buy after a warranty issue. It was an ASUS Republic of Gamers laptop with a 2GB dedicated graphics card (that I hard formerly spilled an entire Nalgene of water on without causing any issue, so yea I definitely recommend Asus laptops!). It still wasn't anywhere near great compared to the desktop options out there, but it's what I had. The best part was the massive fan port in the back so no matter what I did this thing never heated up. Good news when trying to mine crypto coins! At this point, I have no idea how I found out about any of this stuff. But somehow, I found myself with a Doge wallet, the necessary mining software to run on my NVIDIA graphics card, and an active dogecoin miners pool. I created a Reddit and I let the fun begin!
Unfortunately, because I knew how labor-intensive this was on my computer I was afraid to really leave it running a lot. So I'd turn it off at night for fear of waking up to my apartment being on fire. I was in between seasonal jobs at the time so I mostly stayed home and worked on various projects like blogging, youth ministry, homework, and of course, video games. I let the miner run whenever I felt safe and comfortable and I was amazed to see coins trickling in! At the time there really weren't many options to spend the coins on. There was the Reddit Doge tip bot that I sent a bunch of coins to that I believe essentially got stolen from everyone in some kind of big controversy. There was something called "DogeSpin" that I sent a bunch of coins to that I assume was some kind of roulette or something at the time (I sent probably a few thousand coins). But mostly I just collected them to be a part of the fun and perhaps the trolling. We were going to the moon baby!
Spin: Bye Bye Money!
I mined over 16,500 coins!
That's right! Actually, I managed to mine over 20,000 if you didn't count the coins I removed from the wallet. But up until a few weeks ago, I was pretty sure I had around 16,000 doge coins tucked away on a hard drive somewhere. Although, over the years I started to wonder if it was 16,000, or just 1,600. Especially as the numbers of Doge started to rise I doubted I could possibly have that much collecting dust. Occasionally I would think about that Dogecoin and I would look at the price just for fun. Most of the time it hadn't really moved. It was worth less than a penny per coin. A far cry from the moon even after so many years.
Well, actually, there was that one time in December of 2017 where it hit almost .02! Two cents a coin! This was like $300! I was tempted to dig out my Doge and see if I could get it working. But I was too busy or too lazy or didn't quite care enough at the time and the fad passed once again and my Doge was worth hardly anything anymore. I was still just a poor shibe.
As time went on, I almost completely forgot about Dogecoin. Even though Bitcoin seemed to pop up here and there it never really seemed to affect the price of Dogecoin very much. I put the dreams of ever seeing the moon on pause and moved on. I reformatted my hard drive on my computer and life when on.
Good night moon.
But then... Coronavirus happened and 2021 happened. And everything changed.
Please wait for part two to continue following my $5000 Dogecoin journey!
My DOGE Wallet Address: DJAbim34mffQwQSa46U2eJcvNYMhjwxoQi
