Dogecoin’s mining code was initially copied from another crypto project called LuckyCoin. LuckyCoin – a fork of Litecoin, which is a fork of Bitcoin – featured a completely random block reward schedule where miners could receive zero or potentially thousands of free coins for producing new blocks. Australian entrepreneur Jackson Palmer and American software engineer Billy Markus – the two creators of dogecoin – believed the randomness would annoy dogecoin miners and prevent them from actually using the token long term. What is a futures market & how can I use data for spot trading? Obviously, the memes came home to roost dramatically this year, when millions of people across the globe, forced into lockdown by the pandemic, were bored and looking for a pastime. On top of that, the US government issued $1,200 stimulus checks, providing the necessary cash fodder for many amateur traders. Yet the memification of finance had been in the making for a while. It was already rearing its head in 2020, with the improbable success of lesser stocks like Kodak or Hertz, backed in a similar manner through trading on upstart apps. But, really, you can take it all the way back to cryptocurrency.