Another day, another cryptocurrency clusterfuck. This week, the creator of the tipping bot “dogetipbot”—a service that let Reddit users “tip” each other in Dogecoin—announced that his company is broke, he’s broke, and the bot is broke because he spent all the coins, after he himself ran out of money.
It was a particularly weird week for time capsules. Everybody's trying to figure out where those 19th century coins came from, a town in Australia is debating whether they should open a 1994 capsule with old photos of Keith Urban, and one Redditor is trying to bury some dogecoins. Seriously.
In an unusual convergence of Olympic sports, cryptocurrency, and 90s nostalgia, the Jamaican bobsled team is Dogecoin's biggest hero this week. The team turned to the joke currency to raise money for its trip to the Sochi Olympics and, in doing so, raised the Dogecoin to Bitcoin exchange rate by 50 percent in just 12…
You probably won't be surprised one bit to learn there's a new Bitcoin competitor out there. A group of cryptographers just announced the creation of Zerocoin, an ultra-anonymous cryptocurrency that's otherwise a lot like the dozens of other newly launched cryptocurrencies.
There's been a digital cash rush over the past few months, with Bitcoin rising in value from $13.50 to over $1000 in 2013. Economist Paul Krugman calls Bitcoin "evil," while economics-obsessed scifi author Charles Stross says he wishes it would die in fire. Why do they think Bitcoin will usher in the econopocalypse?
