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The Almighty Buck

To the Moon? Dogecoin Leaps 46% in 24 Hours After Tweets From Elon Musk, Snoop Dogg (seattletimes.com) 95

Friday the 71-year-old former lead singer of the band Kiss tweeted "I bought Dogecoin...six figures," to his 922,000 followers, along with other supportive tweets.

Saturday rap artist Snoop Dogg tweeted an image of "Snoop Doge" to his 19.2 million followers.

Later Elon Musk tweeted a picture from the Lion King with Musk's head appearing on a monkey holding up a monkey with Gene Simmons' head, holding up a monkey with Snoop Dogg's head, holding up a Shiba Inu dog (symbolizing Dogecoin). The text of the tweet to his 45.9 million followers: "So... it's finally come to this..." (He also later tweeted "Dogecoin to the Moooonn".)

Hours later Bloomberg reported that Dogecoin "rose 46% in the last 24 hours to 7.4 cents as of 1 p.m. in New York on Sunday," citing data from CoinMarketCap. In fact, Dogecoin is now approaching its all-time high, with a market value of $9.5 billion, making it the world's 10th-largest cryptocurrency. ("Bitcoin has also rallied this week, topping a record of $40,000, before paring gains.")

Business Insider calls Dogecoin a "meme-based cryptocurrency," noting it's "benefited" from the mania driven by Reddit's WallStreetBets. But they also point its year-to-date returns were about 1,032.91% (according to CoinDesk calculations).

"In a world gone mad with a pandemic and social upheaval, cryptocurrencies are having a moment," writes the Chicago Tribune: [Dogecoin] bubbled along for years at well under a penny, but in 2018 leapt to a high of nearly 2 cents as part of a larger cryptocurrency bubble. It didn't last — within a day it was worth less than 1 cent again — but that set a pattern in which everyone from TikTokkers to Musk could make the price jump with some online attention, all the while egged on by investors cheering, "To the moon!" Still, it took the recent stock run-up to catapult the currency to an unprecedented pinnacle, as commenters begged each other not to sell to keep the price high...

Ja'Mal Green, a Black Lives Matter activist and former Chicago mayoral candidate who said he has "many thousands" of Dogecoins, sees the currency as a way for people without much money or financial expertise to get in the game with hedge funds and billionaires. "I like how these groups are coming together to really talk about what it means to play in cryptocurrency or stocks, to play in the market," he said. "It's great to see the bottom 99% come together to figure out how they can achieve wealth together and bridge that economic gap a bit."

But Eric Budish, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business who studies cryptocurrencies, warned they are particularly vulnerable to bubbles because they are not tied to economic fundamentals in the way a stock price (ideally) reflects a company's earnings. As long as everyone holds, he said, the price will indeed go up. The problem is you can never be sure you've picked the right time to cash out. "When people try to sell, the price will come down," he said. "That means everybody wants to sell first. Nobody wants to be the last guy selling, and that's sort of the essence of a pump and dump...."

Nelson Morales, a Beach Park, Illinois, data center engineer who runs a Facebook group called Cryptocurrency of Greater Chicago, has his doubts about the currency. He worries about inexperienced investors getting drawn into a "dangerous, roulette-style pump" that could end with a disastrous crash.

Still, that hasn't stopped him from putting $50 of his own into Dogecoin. "I just want to have a canary in the tunnel," he said. "The canary's still alive. I'm impressed."

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To the Moon? Dogecoin Leaps 46% in 24 Hours After Tweets From Elon Musk, Snoop Dogg

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  • It can't be shorted or restricted... but it can still swing. Violently. I'm just popping popcorn as usual.

    • by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Sunday February 07, 2021 @06:07PM (#61038324) Journal

      It's easy to short cryptocurrencies. You can short anything that you can borrow, or anything that you can make a deal to deliver later at a price set today.

      https://www.investopedia.com/n... [investopedia.com]
      https://www.pickacrypto.com/co... [pickacrypto.com]

      All shorting really is, in essence, is you and I agreeing that you'll buy Dogecoin from me for 8 cents next week. Then I wait until next week to buy some in order to sell it to you.

      If Dogecoin is worth 6 cents next week, I buy it for 6 and sell it to you for 8. Profit for me. If it goes up to 10, I have to buy it for 10 and sell it for 8. I'd lose money.

      Alternatively, you can view it as I borrow your Dogecoin for a week.
      In the meantime, I sell it. I'll have to buy it back next week so I can return it to you.
      There are several mechanisms to achieve that same effect.

      If I borrow your Dogecoin and today, sell it for 7 cents, then next week I buy one for 5 cents to return it to you I've made a profit of 2 cents. On the other hand, if I have to spend 9 cents to get it back, I'd lose 2 cents.

      Shorting cryptocurrencies is a bad idea, for 99.999% of people.
      Anything with crypto is a thousand times riskier than investing in say, Walmart and Nabisco/Mondelez. Shorting adds additional risk. One can control the risk if you really understand a lot of stuff; it's not something most people should be doing.

      • by Kisai ( 213879 )

        Nope, that is not how shorting works.

        Shorting borrows X thing at a high price, to sell at a low price. If it keeps going up, you'll never be able to cover, you're paying interest from the second you borrow it. Because you can't "borrow" crypto coins, this doesn't work.

        Naked short selling, however is theoretically possible, where you sell cryptocoins you don't have to someone directly who has no way to tell you don't have them. It would be insane to do so, but that's part of the goal of cryptocoins, the trac

        • by edis ( 266347 )

          Shorting borrows X thing at a high price, to sell at a low price.

          Such a mess. Where is your profit, if you sell low. There would be none. You sell at high in advance, in expectation of exaggerated price going down at the moment you have to actually transfer subject of advance sale, so you can get it lower with your profit becoming real.

          Now, "46% in the last 24 hours" - it is all game against your minds, folks. You are not to double in your expertise abilities within 24 hours. It is hype, and shameless one, if discarded teenager superstars are joined in chorus by entrepre

        • > Shorting borrows X thing at a high price, to sell at a low price.

          Think that through and get back to us.

          If, after you think about it, that still makes sense to you, you can go borrow some stuff at a high price and sell it to me at a low price. You'll become fabulously wealthy. :)

        • That is one version. Another is that I sell you a contract that guarantees a certain quantity at a certain price, at a later date. I do not need to own (or borrow) what I am writing the contract on. If the price goes down below the contract, you do not exercise the contract, (you buy it directly as it would cost less) but I keep the price of the contract as profit. If the price goes up above the contract, you exercise the contract, I am forced to buy it at the current higher price and sell to you at a loss.
        • by Rinikusu ( 28164 )

          That's.. exactly backwards.

          Shorting is selling something at a high price in anticipation of being able to buy it back at a low price. Naked shorting means there's nothing but a promise to back it up (I'll sell you 1000 of X for $500 now, but you gotta pay up front). The other way means there's something to back it up; you borrow the things you're selling with a promise to return them later. I.e. "Let me borrow 1000 of X and I'll make sure you get 1000 of X back", usually with a fee attached. In this manner,

      • Oh wow, thanks for that 2nd link. I had no idea they were this far along creating crypto derivatives, leverage and everything. So DOGE could actually be short-squeezed. Hilarious. That makes the ultimate crash even more powerful, but no more predictable as to *when*. This is, as usual, going to be an interesting story from the sidelines, a great story for a few winners, and a sad story for a lot of others.

      • message () me when you're free ==>> gg.gg/nd05z
      • i see some people are getting the hang of how this thing works lol - so next up : the jealous elders who feel it needs to be regulated to protect the mundanes from accidentally getting money so they can pay off their loans, student or not and be free of the leash
        sounds like ? yes, well i already have an idol of the chosen one in my hidden shrine i worship after dark when salems lot' inquisitors are sleeping (from 6 until the hour of rising chickens) if da Dogg gets DOGE to bitcoin prices i personally walk
      • Shorts don't work they way you describe. They don't involve an agreement to buy a security back at an agreed price.

        Shorts involve "borrowing" securities. In some markets, there is a fixed date by which those securities must be returned. In others, it's open-ended. The idea being that once you receive the "borrowed" securities you sell them immediately and then buy an equivalent amount -- hopefully at a lower price -- just before you have to return them.

        What you describe is more akin to futures trading
        • >> you can view it as I borrow your Dogecoin for a week.
          >> In the meantime, I sell it. I'll have to buy it back next week so I can return it to you.
          >> There are several mechanisms to achieve that same effect.
          >> If I borrow your Dogecoin and today,

          > Shorts don't work they way you describe. Shorts involve "borrowing" securities. :)

          > They don't involve an agreement to buy a security back at an agreed price.

          As I explained, there are at least four commonly used methods to achieve t

          • Ps - Google "naked short".

            And please, please don't ever short anything.
            If you were absolutely certain that makes shorting doesn't exist, even after I explained it to you, you are not knowledgeable enough about the topic to even think about doing it.

  • Sooooo. . . . (Score:2, Insightful)

    by quonset ( 4839537 )

    We're okay with this market manipulation because it's from Musk and Snoop?

    Musk was already in hot water with the SEC for previous market manipulation comments [industryweek.com].

    • Re:Sooooo. . . . (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 07, 2021 @06:15PM (#61038348)

      Can you point out any US law that you think Musk or Snoop violate by saying positive things about dogecoin? Unlike TSLA stock, dogecoin is not owned by any company. No one controls it. Even the programmers that made it don't control it any longer. As we've seen with BTC, if programmers try to substantially change the algorithm, users are free to not accept their change which causes the change to fork and the original code with mass adoption to stay as-is.

    • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      They are not market manipulating, they are not involved in any the trades in any way shape or form. They are being arseholes playing the idiot get rich quick sheeple for fun, the idle games of the rich fucking over the idiot poor desperate to be rich. Stop fucking doing it, it is not funny, you are being arseholes, yes they are idiot sheeple but they were born that way, not a choice, what they are doing is extremely cruel and mean spirited.

  • by gurps_npc ( 621217 ) on Sunday February 07, 2021 @05:47PM (#61038278) Homepage

    Look, Musk is a great engineer and Snoop is a great musician.

    Taking investment advice from them is like asking Warren Buffet to build a car or sing a song.

    • by lobiusmoop ( 305328 ) on Sunday February 07, 2021 @05:50PM (#61038284) Homepage

      In the words of the late great George Carlin - Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        In the words of the late great George Carlin - Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

        That is why all kinds of pyramid-schemes continue to work so well: People do not understand how things work and, at the same time, think they are the enlightened ones that do and all _others_ do not get it. The seminal work "Incompetent and Unaware of it" by Dunning and Kruger describes this nicely.

      • I'm sure there's a sub-joke about average vs median in there somewhere.

    • by monkeyxpress ( 4016725 ) on Sunday February 07, 2021 @06:13PM (#61038338)

      Look, Musk is a great engineer and Snoop is a great musician.

      Taking investment advice from them is like asking Warren Buffet to build a car or sing a song.

      I actually think the message these guys are sending - that the value of crypto currencies is arbitrary and due to it being hyped into the public conscience by vested interests - is actually a very good message. It's certainly a lot more responsible that the suit-wearing banker clowns trying to talk about 'fundamentals' when it comes to their new sucker-mine

      If folks want to go to the crypto casino then that's up to them. Personally I won't go near the stuff because the big players (hedge funds, goldman sachs) are now playing, and those guys are smart, ruthless, and much more connected than I can ever hope to be. At best I might be the lucky small fish in the big pond, but in aggregate I'm going to get hosed by those guys. I mean, in the first BitCoin boom you could even see they waiting until they had gotten their derivative market in place before they crashed the currency. It's not good enough for them to make money on the way up. They have to be able to empty your wallets in both directions and then some.

      Unfortunately the toxic financial industry is doing the same thing with many other financial assets now (I mean, even Buffett is just sitting around on cash, not being able to compute the almost total destruction of value investing), so it's getting harder and harder to not have to play in their casino.

      • It is not that hard to still make money in the market. Several distinct ways to do it, because they still are a positive sum game i.e. the companies pay dividends (and therefore are not a casino as casinos never pay dividends to players).

        1. Buy index ETFs,
        2. Buy the normal stocks that are not being gamed by PR/reddit/celebrities.
        3. If you are very skilled, buy a straddle or strangle. I do not advise this if you are not already a millionaire or very knowledgeable about an industry.

        • by torkus ( 1133985 )

          Welcome to 'how not to give investment advice 101' where we'll share advice that works for some, in some situations, but could also lead to losing money.

          Free advice is worth the price paid. Just sayin.

      • It's certainly a lot more responsible that the suit-wearing banker clowns trying to talk about 'fundamentals' when it comes to their new sucker-mine ...
        so it's getting harder and harder to not have to play in their casino.

        The stock market turns into a casino when people start putting fundamentals in air quotes like thats's a scam, don't bother learn or pay attention to any fundamentals, then complain that it's all arbitrarily and disconnected from any underlying reality because hype, and then buy or sell the hyped assets. Then you blame "them" for the market being irrational, and the mass stupidity of retail investors flooding the market doing the same thing, because fundamentals are hype, and what Elon says is real. Then

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Musk is a great engineer

      Citation needed.

    • Musk is great at marketing.

      Here he's realised that if he says "Doge" then the price rockets. Since he already had a pile of them he probably added a billion or two to his net worth just by doing this.
    • by torkus ( 1133985 )

      That's a very sad straw man.

      Taking investment advice from the richest person on the planet who's built his fortune himself essentially from scratch in ~25 years? Yeah, sign me up.

    • It's 'Dogg' not 'Dog'. He even goes to great lengths to spell it out in nearly every song...
  • To be fair ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Sunday February 07, 2021 @05:50PM (#61038286)

    Business Insider calls Dogecoin a "meme-based cryptocurrency," ...

    Aren't they all?

    • by pr0t0 ( 216378 )

      Really, for a cryptocurrency that started off as a joke, the most hilarious thing would be for it to go north of $1000 and make many into millionaires. Even now I'm chuckling at the thought. You go little doggie!

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Well, for every millionaire "made", there is a bunch of people that have lost more than a million. Crypto-"currencies" do not generate value. They just redistribute it and they destroy value in the process by consuming real-world resources and generating nothing in return.

        • by Ed Avis ( 5917 )
          Not so; there are bitcoin billionaires but that doesn't mean that others have lost the corresponding amount of billions. The wealth of a holder of bitcoins is on paper. If the bitcoin price doubles, those holding it have "made money" but nobody else has lost money (unless they had a short position in bitcoin). Let the price fall to zero, and some investors will "lose billions" but there isn't any corresponding windfall to other people.
          • by gweihir ( 88907 )

            Nope. The only way to convert BTC to real currency or real value is if somebody converts in the other direction. The whole thing is zero-sum within the BTC space and negative-sum overall because of the insane cost of "mining" BTC. As BTC is completely unsuitable for actual use as a currency, due to high volatility and abysmally slow and expensive transactions, this is the situation. And this will remain the situation.

            • by Ed Avis ( 5917 )

              I agree it's a zero sum game, so anyone who makes real money out of bitcoin means someone else has lost real money. But you can only decide winners and losers once the game has ended and everyone has converted their holdings to cash. If someone invested in bitcoin early, got out, and now holds a million in real US dollars, that million dollars gain has come from somebody else losing, but it's not yet clear who it was. (The lucky millionaire might have sold their holdings to Joe, but Joe may end up making

    • Business Insider calls Dogecoin a "meme-based cryptocurrency," ...

      Aren't they all?

      Dodgy coin is the cryptocurrency is a meme, meme

  • So Dogg has six figures. That's > 100,000. If he had a quarter million he would have bragged about that. So let's say he has 150,000. Assume he got in at 2 cents. That's $3000. Big Fucking Whoopie. BTW what time does the game start? It's nearly 10:30am here and I'm ready for my first beer.

  • There's a genuine difference between this kind of thing and previous tulip manias.
    This time around, everyone is aware that they are buying and selling literally nothing.

    • Re: Tulipcoin (Score:2, Flamebait)

      by soccer1mt ( 5332547 )
      Nonsense. The world was never going to run on tulips. The world very well may run on some of the crypto systems being developed today. If you have money to invest, why wouldnâ(TM)t you take the opportunity to get a share of these systems early? But I guess you can keep parroting the same bullshit you hear while the dollar continues to be devalued into the ground. the people that are able to appropriately incorporate crypto into their overall financial plan will be just fine
      • by edis ( 266347 )

        The world very well may run on some of the crypto systems being developed today.

        Or tomorrow. What really makes somebody ow to that doggie of yours?

        But I guess you can keep parroting the same bullshit you hear while the dollar continues to be devalued into the ground.

        42% in 24 hours. Guess what is the problem segment of devaluation. Cancer unhealthy segment?

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Aware, yes. Realizing what that means, no.

    • Do you tulip people actually know anything about the tulip bubble or do you just know that there was one?

      I ask because in virtually every crypto story you all show up. You've been doing it for years. Yet the example you rely on actually lasted only a few weeks. How is crypto, which people like you have spent years equating to a phenomenon that lasted weeks, comparable?

      And your "this time around" makes even less sense. They Dutch weren't trading physical tulip bulbs during the bubble, but futures contr
  • by Sebby ( 238625 ) on Sunday February 07, 2021 @06:41PM (#61038400)

    Here's a couple of good Twitter threads [twitter.com] by Stephen Diehl (@smdiehl) about what Bitcoin really is (with an earlier one further down below), which applies to pretty much any crypto currency.

    *** TRIGGER WARNING The Bitcoin boosters might want to avert their eyes! ***

    Let's discuss the environmental cost of bitcoin. Because despite all the push for sustainable and green investment in the tech sector, there's a giant smoldering Chernobyl sitting at the heart of Silicon Valley which a lot of investors would prefer you remain quiet about. Thread (1/)

    TLDR on bitcoin economics: It's a pyramid-shaped investment scheme backed by the collective delusion that value can created out of nothing by convincing greater fools to buy it after you do. [references earlier thread, also down below] (2/)

    That alone is sufficiently awful on its own merits, but on top of this the environmental damages of bitcoin are enough to make even Greta Thunberg weep at the pointless waste of it all. (3/)

    The underlying technology of bitcoin is based on the notion of "mining", a technical term for a process that keeps the network running and processing transactions. (4/)

    I won't cover the details of the algorithm, suffice it to say the premise of bitcoin mining is to prove how much power you can waste, and the more power you can waste, the more tokens you can probabilistically secure in exchange for your energy waste. (5/)

    And so people have set up entire warehouses of computer hardware dedicated to run 24/7 consuming power and performing the trial computations required by the protocol. Globally this consumes *nation state* levels of energy to keep it all running. (6/)

    Bitcoin mining is essentially a fucked up version of Candy Crush where you solve puzzles for coins, except the coins go to buy darknet fentanyl, launder money for warlords and provide gambling for hedge fund managers. (7/)

    And the scale of this waste has some scary numbers attached to it. A single bitcoin transaction alone consumes 621 KWh, or half a million times more energy consumption than a credit card payment. (8/)

    The bitcoin network annually wastes 78 TWh (terrawatt hours) annually or the energy consumption of several *million* US households. WolframAlpha gives some scary comparisons to help you relate to how much energy this is (think nuclear weapons). (https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=77.78+terrawatt+hours [wolframalpha.com])(9/)

    Unlike other economic activities, the bitcoin scheme produces absolutely nothing for all this waste. It is a pure speculative activity of people gambling on the random movements of prices and the only output is simply shuffling numbers around in a computer at insane cost. (10/)

    In addition to the energy waste and CO2 emitted, the mining process itself requires constant replacement of hardware and produces a steady stream of waste from broken and exhausted computer parts. All of which are full of toxins and rare earth metals. (11/)

    The network produces 11.27 kilotons of waste annually or 96 grams of electronic waste per transaction. This is the equivalent annual e-waste as several small countries and equivalent to the waste of 482,456 people living at the German standard. (12/)

    Try to imagine a future where paying for your morning coffee involved smashing an iPhone and burning enough fossil fuels to run your entire household for 60 days. That's the environmental cost of the "revolutionary" technology behind #Bitcoin in a nutshell. (13/)

    Climate scientists have estimated that #Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2C. And this is just one of *hundreds* of other cryptocurrency networks that run on this apocalyptically wasteful set of ideas. (14/) (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8 [nature.com])

    Climate change is not so

  • My wife wanted a new laptop. I ordered a $3000 laptop for her a couple of days ago and brought $7000 of dogecoin at the same time to pay for it. Now the dogecoin has increased more than $3000 and paid for the laptop.

    Wow
    Much laptop
    So Dogecoin

    • Kind of like buying a collectible baseball card that went up in value.

      • Nothing like it. You can hold a baseball card. And don't say you can print a dogecoin because it's not the same - it's just an alphanumeric representation of something that only exists in an artificial space. If you scanned and printed your baseball card, the facsimile would lose 99.99% of it's value.
        • Dogecoin is exchangeable for money, which can pay for laptops that are more useful than baseball cards.

          That and I have no interest in baseball but I do enjoy identifying and trading on price spikes on any tradable thing.

        • Your bank account is nothing but data the same as dogecoin. Your bank might have enough cash on hand to back it but certainly not everyone.

  • Predictions on the pump were pretty good.
    Very risky though. There isn't any value in Doge.
    The dev team is almost absent, they've made zero innovations.
    Heck Doge is still vulnerable to double spending and pumping the price makes it more likely.

    If I had to pick a joke coin I'd go with turtlecoin. Very active dev team, innovative and always furthering the technology and code base.
    That said Doge will be paying my bills for the next feww months at the expense of suckers.

    Money needs to be stable, and these anti

  • Meme's have a life of their own and break the normal rules of wall street. Hedge Funds aren't gonna know what to do with it.

  • Fascinating. If I did not already have a PhD, I might be interested in analyzing and modeling this non-rational herd-behavior for one.

  • ... to play with this market if you have some power.

    Sure, you could say the same about the stock exchange, but at least there's *some* regulation and at least there's *usually* connections to tangible goods.

    I played with Crypto, got burned, HODL with a hefty loss for 3 damn years until the recent price upsurge, broke even and bailed.
    And I guess the meme "weak hands" would thus apply to me - "If you would've just held on for XYZ more..."
    Yeah, right, this "market" can tank in a heartbeat.
    Bitcoin is the new Go

    • Iâ(TM)m glad folks like you are taking a stand against cryptocurrency speculation.

      One thing I would like to mention as well is that even gold as an âoeinvestmentâ is quite terrible. Exchanging cash for gold is fairly easy, but exchanging gold for goods requires conversion to cash, and this conversion to cash puts the seller at the mercy of an entire industry designed to squeeze money out of gold sellers through fees related to the measurement, verification, and exchange of gold.

      In other words

  • Just a correction. Gene Simmons is the bass guitar player. He is singing some songs, but the main singer is Paul Stanley.

    And "former" is misleading. He was always been the bass guitar player. If "former" is meant that the band is no longer existing, this is not quiet right. Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley did events like boat tours with fans and also concerts before corona.

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