Why do we love $DOGE?

"A Shiba Inu $DOGE is man and woman's best friend. It may not be the hero the world deserves right now, but it may be the one that we need right now." - Tyler Winklevoss

It’s pretty simple actually. We want a hero to save us from the strangest era in modern history. We have been stuck at home, lost loved ones, reshaped how we work, and rekindled old hobbies. I even performed two Zoom weddings as an officiant. I didn't get a Peloton treadmill, thankfully.

As Joseph Campell taught us in his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, mythological narratives frequently share a fundamental structure. The motif of the archetypal narrative is "the hero's adventure". A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

As a Gen X kid I watched Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Batman, and read Dune, Beowulf, The Three Musketeers, and Don Quixote. I am no stranger to hero worship. In fact, over the last year I have revisited more movies, old books, comics, and even restarted collecting sports cards which I hadn't done since 1988. I was in middle school then and realized card collecting was for nerds but more importantly Topps overprinted baseball cards and caused a market collapse ("the junk wax era").

I think a lot about value. What do you value? Time with your friends and family, travel, success, fitness. I think a lot about money. I want more of it, but I am not unique in wanting more money, but what is money? Crypto emergence has forced me to think deeply about this. The latest crypto boom has arrived and it will inevitably end with a crash. There will be fears of increased regulation, country bans, and other FUD. Each time the floor is much higher though. As I learned as a kid, money, much like baseball cards is an abstract concept with a store of value and a medium of exchange. It isn't easy to cut a Mickey Mantle card in half to buy something, so it loses easily on the divisibility compared to money, but they aren't making more Mickeys. What anyone that has taken intro to economics can easily grok is that if a central authority prints or lends too much of an asset it forces excess capacity into the system. This excess “money” or “capital” flows into anything with a perceived utility or value — real estate, stocks, bonds, baseball cards. Or even ... a digital meme of a dog that currently has a $74 billion market cap. 

The perfect storm of humans being stuck at home has brought us a new decentralized Occupy Wall Street reverie. The masses are angry that the owners of the capital (and labor) always win everything. The angry mob on Reddit, Twitter, and elsewhere in the metaverse are making a decentralized and yet coordinated move on assets inflating their value. It can be a Gamestop style pump to squeeze a group of hedge funds rooting against a broken asset or a pump of a coin with a dog on it. The outcry from big capital will obviously lean onto the tool makers & regulators of the game to recoup loses while secretly hedging by buying into these new assets.

The fun part of this game is that a handful of retail investors have the chance to pocket outsized returns. The not so fun part is that trading and investing is really hard. Building a repeatable process with risk management takes decades to learn as a craft. Many speculators will give back winnings and more while others may have life changing or otherwise lucky events and cash out. It's all a bit crazy, and the masters of the universe will likely be bruised or miss out on speculative gains but will not sustain permanent damage. The rules of the game are being edited. I am enjoying the ride as we re-evaluate everything. Global vs. local authority, decentralized governance, Internet 3.0, physical vs. digital collaboration, interplanetary travel. There is so much happening right now it's no surprise that we are somehow pumping up a digital meme. Gold still has an estimated total market cap of $11.5 trillion so there won't be a "flippening" any time soon with DOGE, but perhaps there will be with Bitcoin in the next decade.

Dogecoin may be used for payments and purchases, but it’s not a very effective store of value. There is no lifetime cap on the number of Dogecoins that may be created by mining—meaning that the cryptocurrency is highly inflationary. The blockchain rewards by creating millions of new Dogecoins every day, which makes it very challenging for speculative price gains in Dogecoin to hold up over time. As always, do your own homework.

Don't forget to watch SNL on Saturday to hear what Elon has to say about $DOGE. We need more heroes.