One of the strangest tech stories I've ever heard, and I was around for GamerGate, Aaron Swartz, and the Dread Pirate Roberts.
If you are familiar with Bitcoin, then Dogecoin is easy enough to understand: it is a cryptocurrency in the Bitcoin mold, only it was intended as a joke, whereas Bitcoin has always been dreadfully serious.
Some guy created a bot on Reddit called dogetipbot, which let users tip one another in Dogecoins, in much the way you can give people Likes here on TBBS. The difference is, Dogecoins are sort of worth money (not much, but still) and so they were cared about just a little bit more. (OK, maybe a lot more.)
Well, the guy who owns dogetipbot tried to turn his free service into a business, because why the fuck not when the Internet was built on bilking VCs out of investment money for services with no revenue model. Only nobody got hooked on his bait, he ran out of money, and he decided to raid everyone's dogetipbot wallets for himself--meaning all those precious Dogecoins are gone. He spent them. (Hopefully not all in one place.)
Since dogetipbot was the single most popular use for Dogecoins, odds are Dogecoin itself is fucked, too.
This also leads to one of the strangest paragraphs I've ever encountered in a tech article:
This is our future, my friends.
If you are familiar with Bitcoin, then Dogecoin is easy enough to understand: it is a cryptocurrency in the Bitcoin mold, only it was intended as a joke, whereas Bitcoin has always been dreadfully serious.
Some guy created a bot on Reddit called dogetipbot, which let users tip one another in Dogecoins, in much the way you can give people Likes here on TBBS. The difference is, Dogecoins are sort of worth money (not much, but still) and so they were cared about just a little bit more. (OK, maybe a lot more.)
Well, the guy who owns dogetipbot tried to turn his free service into a business, because why the fuck not when the Internet was built on bilking VCs out of investment money for services with no revenue model. Only nobody got hooked on his bait, he ran out of money, and he decided to raid everyone's dogetipbot wallets for himself--meaning all those precious Dogecoins are gone. He spent them. (Hopefully not all in one place.)
Since dogetipbot was the single most popular use for Dogecoins, odds are Dogecoin itself is fucked, too.
This also leads to one of the strangest paragraphs I've ever encountered in a tech article:
This is our future, my friends.
