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Severe cash is flowing to the joke cryptocurrency Dogecoin.

In the midst of the so-called meme stick frenzy, it may be fitting that a cryptocurrency based on a meme has been swept insane.

Dogecoin, a digital currency created as a hoax, is now the 10th largest cryptocurrency in the world, according to CoinMarketCap. The price is up more than 1,600 percent this year, fueled by cheerleading in recent days from celebrities like Tesla’s Elon Musk, rapper Snoop Dogg, and rocker Gene Simmons of Kiss, all of whom have been promoting Dogecoin on social media, was advanced.

Dogecoin is called a “fun and friendly internet currency” by its creators. The token was created in 2013 as a meme-based satire about the spread of dubious crypto coins at the time. The internet meme “Doge” with a constantly surprised Shiba Inu dog went viral at the time.

Dogecoin holders often use the tokens to give each other little tips on online forums or to band together to take on unlikely causes, such as sponsoring Jamaica’s two-man bobsleigh team at the 2014 Winter Olympics.

When talking about the Clubhouse audio-sharing app last week, Mr Musk said his ardent support for Dogecoin – he came from a self-imposed Twitter break to tweet about it – was a complex joke in itself. “Dogecoin was made as a joke to make fun of cryptocurrencies, but fate loves irony,” he said. “The most ironic result would be that Dogecoin will become the currency of the earth in the future.”

Whatever he thinks about Dogecoin, there is no doubt that Mr. Musk is serious about Bitcoin. Tesla announced Monday that it has purchased $ 1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin and will be examining whether it will be accepted as payment for its vehicles.

On Monday morning, Dogecoin rose 30 percent, twice as much as Bitcoin.

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The whole lot’s a Joke Till It’s Not

At first glance, Reddit is a huge collection of forums run by a single private company. It’s in a gray area between small, intimate communities with shared expectations and norms and the mega-platforms that tend to obliterate things like that. Its job is to get people together for free, generate communities and content, and then assign a value to that content so that it can be sorted and shown to millions more people, some of whom are seeing ads.

You might find interesting links on Reddit and watch fun videos. Maybe it’s a place to hang out with a small group of friends or post to a community of millions. More likely, it’s a place you’ve heard of and maybe visited before, where you know people do a lot of things, most of which don’t affect you until they do. Like other social platforms, Reddit has grappled with harassment, hate speech, and abuse, and sometimes banned communities whose influence affected them.

For people studying social platforms like Reddit, WallStreetBets – a clear example of an island Reddit community pushing into the bigger site and beyond – recalled one particular recent precedent: The_Donald, the subreddit that has been around for a few years was long. the venue and central organizational platform for supporters of Donald J. Trump.

To be clear, these precedents aren’t necessarily about ideology or broad style. Some commentators have suggested that the activities advocated by WallStreetBets and Trumpism are part of the same anti-elite populist phenomenon, but if Trumpism is educational here at all, it is a reminder that self-described anti-elite movements can turn out to be found out that this is much more complicated.

WallStreetBets may look like a wall of slang, memes, jargon, and inside jokes that is largely male populated, and it is. But it’s also a financial forum that subscribers share with other, simpler financial forums. (All of the top 20 subreddits WallStreetBets subscribers share stocks with are for stocks, finance, betting, or cryptocurrency. The first one that isn’t between PersonalFinanceCanada and poker is a community called FrugalMaleFashion.) There is a long and complicated series rules that go beyond the rules enforced by Reddit itself, some broad (no market manipulation) and some narrow and exclusive (screenshots of your “positions” must be “equity or losses greater than $ 2,500 or $ 10,000 for options or stocks ” demonstrate).