Dogecoin Price Prediction (no joke) 🚀

I can't believe I'm saying this... but Dogecoin is NO joke. At this point, it demands to be taken seriously. It's not stopping until it hits $1 a coin, and surpassing a $100B market cap. That's my wild prediction. But the odds of this playing out are too difficult to compute, thus making it a pure gamble with a lot of downside risk. But, then again, isn't that what Bitcoin was at its early stages? 🤔 That being said, let me tell you why I believe $1 per DOGE is achievable. But, like me, I hope you are comfortable staying away for now – due to the downside risk.

Contrary to what people believe, DOGE does have fundamentals, similar to Bitcoin and fiat currency. I would say it's the perfect marriage between them. Let me break down the similarities and differences between Bitcoin and Dogecoin.

Bitcoin was created as a potential alternative to the current financial system, which goes against the ideology of central banks. It served a rebellious mission. Doge, on the other hand, was an apparent joke. It was almost a mockery of Bitcoin and the concept of decentralized currency. But, who doesn't like a good joke?

Bitcoin vs. Dogecoin

Technical Differences

This section is admittedly a bit nerdy, so read/skim accordingly.

This is the most important part to understand as to whether Dogecoin is a joke or not. It's important to see how exactly DOGE is it different from Bitcoin.

When Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer founded Dogecoin in 2013, they claim to have copied Bitcoin's code and simply replaced any reference of "Bitcoin" to "Dogecoin" – making it an almost exact replica. It apparently just took 3 hours to make. It was an obvious joke. In fact, Billy Markus sold his DOGE to buy a used Honda Civic in 2015. Based on my calculations, that Honda Civic would be worth about $80M today!

In any case, they did update the code over time... and, today, there are a few technical differences vs. Bitcoin to note.

Every cryptocurrency has a mining (or digging, in the case of DOGE) algorithm. This set of rules determines how new coins are minted in the blockchain. The key elements of the algorithm are:

Block Time: The average length of time it takes for a new block of transactions to be checked and added to the blockchain.

Difficulty: A number that represents how hard it is to mine each new block of currency. Mining difficulty can go up or down depending on how many miners there are, also adjusted by the coin’s protocol to make sure that the block time stays the same.

Reward: amount of new currency that is awarded to the miner of each new block.

Dogecoin reduces the block time of 10 minute (from Bitcoin) to 1 minute. This effectively makes mining much easier and faster, which also enables the creation of more coins. Dogecoin also rewards diggers (a.k.a. miners) with 10,000 coins for every verified block, whereas Bitcoin rewards miners with (currently) just 6.25 coins (which halves every 210,000 blocks, or approximately every 4 years). So, because of the scarcity, Bitcoin is naturally more valuable.

Adding to Bitcoin's scarcity, is the fact that only 21 million coins will ever be mined (with the last issued sometime in 2140). Whereas Dogecoin, to keep up with faster mining, will have 5 billion coins created each year.

Another key technical difference between the two is consensus. Bitcoin uses the SHA-256 to guide the mining, which is much slower and requires a lot more power than Scrypt which is used by Dogecoin (and Litecoin). This was differentiated to make mining more easy and fair, because mining with Bitcoin is pretty expensive. More people can mine Dogecoin. In fact, Litecoin and Dogecoin merged in 2014 – meaning they can now be mined in the same process!

If I were to enter the mining business today, I'd go digging for Doge!

In summary, Bitcoin is designed to be deflationary; whereas Dogecoin, much like fiat currency, is designed to be inflationary. Other than that, they are pretty close to identical. In fact, one can make the case that Dogecoin is fundamentally more viable as a currency to transact with day-to-day. If Bitcoin is widely accepted as "digital gold", why is Dogecoin not seriously considered "digital currency"? There's no reason to dismiss it as a joke!

If you still think Dogecoin is a joke, then by association, you have to think Bitcoin is also a joke.

Concentration

The biggest issue with Dogecoin, which Elon Musk also pointed out, is its concentration. The top 9 wallets hold more than 40% of all Dogecoin. Let's say Robinhood is the largest one. That's still leave us with 8 people holding more than 10% of all currency. If we include the next 72 large investors, that's 80 people holding, again, almost 40% of all Dogecoin. Although we have a large wealth gap today, I wouldn't imagine it being this big..

Price

When it comes to price, it's easy to say Doge will never be as high as Bitcoin due to its inflationary nature. However, from a performance perspective, from the chart below you can see how vastly Dogecoin outperformed Bitcoin in the past year. No further comment needed here.

Where should you "invest"?

All this being said, I do think Dogecoin is the real deal... there's no reason to think it's just a joke anymore. However, due to the concentration risk and people buying in a pure speculative frenzy, the downside risk is very high. The downside with Bitcoin is NOT as high, because of the institutional adoption, maturity, and deflationary nature.

I never thought I'd say this, but I do see the case for Dogecoin hitting $1. That's a 65% return from here, but it also comes with an equal downside risk. In order to factor in that risk, I'd only go with a very small allocation – considering it's honestly just a gamble. I do think the Bitcoin upside can be much higher in the long-run.

But, if you're a believer in Bitcoin, by association, you have to be a believer in Dogecoin. There's no reason not to be anymore. So, like I said, Dogecoin is no longer a joke and should be taken seriously, because I think it's here to stay... but we're in for a ride either way.