Doge was a new cryptocurrency, and had a low hash rate. Not only was there tipping involved ... that came later. A large part of its hashrate came from it being so easy to mine. There were hundreds of people posting on threads there learning how to mine just stablecoin. Imagine how many were trying to mine dogecoin? The first few days I got tens of thousands, on miserable hardware. People who didn't even know what they were doing got millions.

Then there was an irc chat right on some of the pools .. so the comfortable thread like nature could continue.

My point here is that you got people who didn't even think about a power bill into mining because it was easy to do and got a couple dollars on your computer, however few dollars that was. The mining came before the tipping, and that's what brought the people to want to tip - because it was worth jack squat to someone who was around for a week and knew that 50 doge was nothing .. but to someone who didn't and was just moving with the exuberant herd .. well that was really something.

Really, in one night, you had hundreds of people who would just sit in a thread and flame people for no reason set up a server, start mining and find a block. It was just so easy and it had some kind of value (which is more value than sitting around flaming people and not getting magic internet money - the choice was logical). Again, the tipping came later.


It had nothing to do with BTC being an exclusive rich club .. it had more of a creepy lurker vibe than anything else .. like the 22 year old man who's telling you he's making an Iron Man suit out of titanium in his dorm room. People were even making flame 'buttcoin' threads pretty regularly. It was a joke that Doge captured pretty well .. without being directly offensive. Satire.