狗狗幣Dogecoin是什麼？讓Elon Musk也瘋狂 狗狗幣的起源、用途介紹 #虛擬貨幣 (160001)

狗狗幣Dogecoin是什麼？讓Elon Musk也瘋狂 狗狗幣的起源、用途介紹 #虛擬貨幣 (160001)

GME軋空事件震撼了美國金融圈，除了股票市場動盪之外，虛擬貨幣也連帶受到了影響。日前台灣中央銀行粉絲專頁發表了一篇介紹「狗狗幣」的貼文，狗狗幣(Dogecoin)又稱為「多吉幣」或「旺旺幣」，和比特幣(Bitcoin)同樣屬於虛擬貨幣的一種。2021年初GME事件發生，狗狗幣在美國Reddit鄉民和Elon Musk的連帶鼓吹之下達到超過800%的漲幅，出乎意料地再度成為了金融圈的話題焦點。雖然狗狗幣如今已成為世界上流通的主要虛擬貨幣之一，但事實上，狗狗幣的起源只不過是一句玩笑話，它的建立也可以歸因於網路迷因的流行。為什麼狗狗幣叫做「狗狗幣」？和網路迷因有什麼關係呢？讓我們繼續看下去。

相較於比特幣起源於一篇嚴肅的學術論文，狗狗幣的誕生可說是非常「獨特」，它的創造可以說是網路流行話題的結合，也因此狗狗幣的代表圖案就是知名的迷因Doge。相信大部分的人都曾經看過柴犬Doge(狗狗的實際名字為Kabosu，醋橙，但迷因稱之為Doge)的梗圖，1隻日本柴犬配上特定的文字說明，在台灣尤其以「關於感情的問題我一律建議分手」為最主要的流行。

2013年正逢比特幣興起，許多跟風的山寨虛擬貨幣也像春筍般冒出，而同時鋪天蓋地的Doge梗圖也直接或間接造成了網路使用者的精神汙染。狗狗幣的創始人之一，Jackson Palmer當時是Adobe的員工，他用一種諷刺的幽默感將Doge梗圖和虛擬貨幣結合，製作了一張有著Doge頭像的貨幣。Jackson Palmer將這張惡搞圖案放上Twitter，寫著「投資狗狗幣吧！這將是下一件大事(或譯為『一定可以大賺一筆』)」的貼文內容，在發佈之後，這則貼文很快地受到廣大網友們的迴響，於是Jackson Palmer在網友們的鼓吹之下，買下dogecoin.com網域，並在網站留下訊息，徵求想要讓狗狗幣成真的夥伴。

事實上，Jackson Palmer對於加密貨幣一竅不通，狗狗幣也真的只是一個玩笑話，從來沒有想過會真的實現。然而，IBM的工程師Billy Markus在偶然下看見了狗狗幣的訊息，Billy Markus一直都有研究加密貨幣，希望能夠創造出一款讓人們可以廣泛使用，而非單純使用於投資的虛擬貨幣。於是Billy Markus在見到狗狗幣網站後，聯繫了Jackson Palmer，二人的合作讓狗狗幣正式誕生，並且在網路迷因的散播之下，dogecoin.com網站短短30天之內就有超過百萬名訪客。

▲狗狗幣介紹。創造於2013年12月，由萊特幣(Litecoin，比特幣的改進)中派生出來。狗狗幣將挖礦(mining)改成挖洞(diging)，並且將字體改成Doge迷因中使用的Comic Sans字體。

狗狗幣的創辦人Jackson Palmer曾經提過，狗狗幣和比特幣最大的不同，在於狗狗幣並非為了投資而生，因此它擁有更低的挖礦(挖洞)門檻、更方便的購買方式、以及更低的交易費用。在理想的情況下，狗狗幣被設定為一種輕鬆詼諧的虛擬貨幣，它站在虛擬貨幣投資的對立面，一開始設定為1000億個，後續則改為數量無上限，保護狗狗幣的價格。

因為狗狗幣並不值錢，它最常使用在小費和打賞的情況，網友可以在網路上用狗狗幣表達感謝、支持，且因為一般人無法擁有比特幣等其他虛擬貨幣，狗狗幣正好填補了這樣的空缺，讓對虛擬貨幣有興趣的人更容易參與。狗狗幣也常被使用在慈善行為，在2014年，當狗狗幣社群見到牙買加雪橇代表隊沒有經費參與冬季奧運的時候，他們建立了募款活動，最終成功讓雪橇隊可以出國比賽。

對於雪橇隊的比賽支持讓狗狗幣多出了一種俠義的形象，接下來狗狗幣還完成了肯亞水井挖掘募資計畫、以及在2014年3月成功募集了6780萬狗狗幣(當時約5.5萬美元)，贊助NASCAR駕駛員Josh Wise比賽。Josh Wise讓賽車使用狗狗幣的贊助塗裝，這讓狗狗幣在比賽過程中被評論員提起，車體亮相的同時也為狗狗幣宣傳。

▲狗狗幣塗裝賽車，後來美國狗狗幣鄉民的力量也讓Josh Wise在粉絲投票比賽中勝出。(圖片來源：Wiki)

Good to see @Josh_Wise bring back the @dogecoin helmet last weekend! That was such an awesome deal to be apart of pic.twitter.com/VaLUt3LssY

比特幣以外的新星！狗狗幣今年漲900%

Dogecoin（狗狗幣：DOGE-USD）在今年成為眾人矚目的焦點。從今年開始，狗狗幣的價格僅為0.005美元，到2月初達到了創紀錄的0.0872美元，即8.7美分。現在是5.7美分。

聽起來價格不算很高，但百分比確實增加了很多。今年到目前為止，狗狗幣的價格上漲了900％。

在過去的12個月中，加密貨幣的交易和投資激增，包括比特幣、以太坊、萊特幣等。最受歡迎的比特幣在2021年上漲了95％，價格剛剛超過57,000美元。同時，許多國家的利率處於創紀錄的低水平。因此，大量投資者將加密貨幣視為一種財富，類似於黃金或其他商品所提供的財富。

狗狗幣目前的市值為73億美元，是最有價值的加密貨幣之一。澳大利亞新南威爾士大學的Usman Chohan表示，狗狗幣的市值在2014年僅為4,800萬美元。他指出，狗狗幣的生產時間表也很瘋狂。到2015年年中，已經有1,000億個硬幣，並且以每年大約生產52億個新硬幣的進度成長中。

儘管短期內可能出現波動，但鑑於投資者對加密貨幣的風險偏好，預計狗狗幣遲早會創下新高。

Dogecoin是由軟體工程師Billy Markus和Jackson Palmer於2013年發明。他們的主要目的是創建一種無需傳統銀行手續費的即時付款系統。與比特幣不同，狗狗幣不限制可以生產的硬幣數量。

最初，狗狗幣主要用於在互聯網上，「感謝」他人的「積極貢獻」，例如提供想法或與網路相關的服務。但是自2013年以來，人們對狗狗幣的興趣逐漸建立起來。

然後，在2021年1月，Gametop和AMC Entertainment開始了大反彈，這主要是由於Reddit交易員的興趣。當這些散戶投資者尋找下一個趨勢時，狗狗幣獲得他們的青睞。

特斯拉CEO馬斯克也在推波助瀾，他在2月4日發推文改挺狗狗幣，一句「狗狗幣是大家的加密通貨」（Dogecoin is the peoples crypto），幫助該幣當日飆漲超過50％，攻上0.05978美元。

狗狗幣最初被視為模仿硬幣，如今已名列成千上萬種加密貨幣中市值排名在前的熱門商品。然而，計算狗狗幣的真正價值並非易事。目前市場上狗狗幣被高估，還是低估的說法都存在。

目前投資者希望狗狗幣能一路反彈至1美元，但它的價格暫時可能會起伏不定。

文章來源：Investorplace

（ 中時新聞網 趙永紝）

延伸閱讀

全美首家！大摩傳允大咖客戶投資比特幣

美紓困金 估400億美元流入股市與比特幣

虛擬貨幣交易夯！美國比特幣ATM暴增

Dogecoin (DOGE): What It Is, What It’s Worth and Should You Be Investing?

The New York Times

NAIROBI, Kenya — The nurse lay in bed this month, coughing, wheezing and dizzy with fever. It was three months after rich countries began vaccinating health workers, but Kenyans like the nurse, Stella Githaiga, had been left behind: Employed in the country’s largest public hospital, she caught the coronavirus on an outreach trip to remote communities in February, she believes, sidelining her even as Kenya struggles with a vicious third surge of infections. Githaiga and her colleagues are victims of one of the most galling inequities in a pandemic that has exposed so many: Across the global south, health workers are being sickened and killed by a virus from which doctors and nurses in many rich countries are now largely protected. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times That is just the most visible cost of a rich-poor divide that has deepened in the second year of the pandemic. Of the vaccine doses given globally, roughly three-quarters have gone to only 10 countries. At least 30 countries have not yet injected a single person. Scientists have long warned that such unfair treatment could not only haunt poorer countries, but also rich ones, if the continued spread of the virus allows it to mutate in ways that undermine vaccines. But the greatest human costs will almost surely be borne by less wealthy nations. Already, unvaccinated doctors and nurses have died this year in countries including Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria and Zimbabwe, depleting health systems that can ill afford to lose any more workers and threatening to diminish the level of care in nations overrun by variants. The toll in Africa could be especially profound. The continent has 17% of the world’s people, but so far, it has administered roughly 2% of the vaccine doses given globally. “I don’t think we have the capacity, as a country and even as Africa, to treat our own,” said Hazel Miseda Mumbo, vice chancellor of the Great Lakes University of Kisumu in Kenya, who has studied the country’s health system. “While these countries in the West are still scrambling for vaccines, Africa will have to wait. It may be a sad situation.” In a worrisome sign of how uneven distribution is, even Kenya, one of the continent’s wealthier countries, is faring badly. The first million COVID-19 vaccine doses arrived just before midnight March 2. The elated health minister, Mutahi Kagwe, said that the country had “been fighting this virus with rubber bullets,” but now had finally acquired the metaphorical equivalent of “machine guns, bazookas, and tanks.” But that arsenal was not all it appeared to be. The doses were a month late, and a quarter of what had been promised. India recently stepped in with a relatively small, but welcome, addition of 100,000 doses. Kenya has no idea when exactly the next batch of vaccines will arrive. Even under the best of circumstances, the country is expecting to inoculate only 30% of its people, or about 16 million out of almost 50 million, by the middle of 2023. When the rest of the population will get their shots is anybody’s guess. The initial shipment of doses is being doled to health care workers and other essential workers. For the health workers who have been trying to manage a tenfold increase in daily cases since late January, the initial shots arrived only after the illness did. Githaiga watched from her sickbed as the news media showed health officials and fellow nurses and doctors receiving their shots. “There was so much shock and anxiety dealing with this virus in the past year,” said Githaiga, who was recently released after a week in the hospital. “So how ironic that I was sick on the day the vaccine rolled out. I felt left out.” For wealthy countries, Kenya’s inoculation timeline is unthinkable. Waiting months seems hard enough, especially with dangerous variants circling the world. President Joe Biden has promised to have vaccines for all adults in the United States by the end of May. Israel has vaccinated 60% of its people, and Britain has inoculated 41%. Like many developing countries, Kenya is relying on the global mechanism for procuring and distributing vaccines known as COVAX. The program was built on the idea that many countries, including richer ones, would use it to purchase shots as a way of spreading their bets across vaccine makers. Instead, dozens of wealthy nations bought doses straight from pharmaceutical companies, elbowing the international effort out of the way and delaying shipments to the developing world. Still, analysts said, poorer countries are in a stronger position than they would have been without the effort. COVAX is aiming to cover at least 20% of people in participating countries by the end of the year. In Kenya, stringent restrictions — lockdowns, curfews, flight suspensions and school shutdowns that eventually forced children to repeat the school year — kept the virus from overwhelming the country last year, as did its relatively young population. But control measures like lockdowns, available to rich and poor countries alike, are no longer the best defense against the coronavirus. The most valuable currency is now vaccines, opening a yawning gap between those that can afford them, and those that cannot. The pandemic has worsened in Africa since a variant first seen in South Africa, shown to be able to reinfect people, began driving up cases in southern parts of the continent. “Before that, it was believed that Africa had escaped this pandemic,” said Tulio de Oliveira, a geneticist at the Nelson Mandela School of Medicine in South Africa. “Unfortunately, it didn’t.” With cases soaring in Kenya, vaccine delays will cost more lives. The number of reported COVID-19 cases — more than 120,000 infections that have led to around 2,000 deaths — is thought to be an undercount. The country was expecting more vaccine doses from COVAX. But its health officials had also hoped that the country’s close security and trade relations with the European Union and Britain would help it secure vaccines. Kenya had also ignored other countries’ worries about being used as “guinea pigs” and participated in vaccine trials, raising expectations for earlier shipments. “The clinical trials resulted in vaccines,” said Dr. David Ngira, a postdoctoral researcher in global health law at Cardiff University, who has been tracking vaccine rollouts in Africa. “And on this premise, the Kenyan participants, as well as the surrounding communities and country at large, should have been given some priority in vaccine access.” But that has not happened. Even Kenya’s low expectations have been scaled back: A promised 4.1 million doses from COVAX by May has been cut to 3.6 million doses. The country has ordered a total of 24 million doses. Health officials say they are grateful, but even COVAX shots come with a hitch. Vaccines covering the first 20% of Kenya’s population were free, but only on the grounds that the government pay for enough doses to cover another 10% of its people. For Kenya, that bill is expected to run close to a budget-straining $130 million. An African Union vaccine task force is trying to lighten the burden by helping countries access enough doses to vaccinate 60% of the continent’s population by mid-2022. Vaccine delays are expected to cause economic devastation far beyond those countries that are short on doses. In the most dire scenario envisioned by one group of researchers, with poorer countries largely shut out from vaccines this year, the global economy could suffer losses exceeding $9 trillion, nearly half of which would fall on rich countries like Britain, Canada and the United States. In Africa, though, the costs of the slow rollout to people and to health systems are already soaring. In late January, a heart specialist in Zimbabwe — a mentor to younger doctors and a pillar of the country’s health system — was killed by COVID-19. That same month, a senior doctor in northern Nigeria died from the virus, confined to an isolation center. Kenya’s health system was already hobbled last year by mistreatment of doctors and nurses. Many health workers, unpaid for months in some cases and often given inadequate protective equipment, walked off the job, forcing some hospitals to go months without nurses. One had to close its COVID-19 isolation unit and send patients home. In December, a 28-year-old doctor died from COVID-19 after having worked without a salary for months. “It’s a moral emergency to protect health workers worldwide,” Gavin Yamey, associate director for policy at the Duke Global Health Institute, said. “Sickness and death of health workers in systems that are already weak could exacerbate those problems even further.” For Nyachira Muthiga, a public hospital doctor who worked on a COVID-19 ward in Nairobi last year, the arrival of Kenya’s first vaccines brought a sense of relief. But the crushing experiences of the last year have made her wary. Before contracting the illness herself, she lost many patients. Substandard protective equipment left her vulnerable, she said. And reports of corruption that cheated hospitals of much-needed money, she said, broke something in her. Though she got the vaccine last week, she worries that those same endemic problems in the health system — combined with vaccine hoarding by rich nations — could put shots out of the reach of ordinary Kenyans for much longer. “I am still hopeful,” she said, “that the health of our citizens will be a high priority at some point.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company