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Dogecoin is up 29% in just a few hours. And guess who is behind it?
Right: Elon Musk.
Musk is closed this morning Twitter to say that Tesla could start taking merch orders in DOGE. By “merch”, Musk was referring to the clothing and accessories sold on Tesla’s website – not the cars themselves. Earlier this year, Musk began placing car orders in Bitcoin however found it impractical for environmental reasons. This move to accept merch orders in DOGE would be Tesla’s first foray into crypto payments since bitcoin payments were phased out.
Why Musk likes Doge
Today wasn’t the first time Elon Musk pumped DOGE on Twitter. His tweets at the beginning of the year are said to have triggered the first rally in April / May, which increased the price of DOGE by several thousand percentage points. Before Musk’s pumps, DOGE was considered a joke that no one would ever use as currency. After Musk and Mark Cuban started tweeting about it, that started to change.
Musk has often said that DOGE is the “little guy’s” cryptocurrency. Unlike Bitcoin, you don’t need tens of thousands of dollars to buy a unit of Dogecoin. Bitcoin breaks down into smaller units called satoshis, but Musk says they are more difficult to trade than full Dogecoins. Musk claims to have realized this after noticing that Tesla employees were using Dogecoin instead of Bitcoin because of its lower price and ease of use.
Should mining companies get involved?
Elon Musk is the richest person in the world. He was recently named Person of the Year by Time Magazine. He has 70 million followers on Twitter, and his followers often buy the assets he talks about. Obviously, this is a person of great influence.
This, of course, leads to the question, should crypto mining companies start mining more Dogecoin?
Company like HIVE blockchain (TSXV: HIVE) (NASDAQ: HVBT) have made a lot of money mining Bitcoin and ether. In the most recent quarter, HIVE generated $ 52.6 million in revenue and $ 123 million in crypto assets. That is an admirable achievement. But if HIVE got involved in the downsizing of DOGE, things might go even better.
It only takes 0.12 kWh of electricity to mine a Dogecoin and 707 kWh to mine a Bitcoin. So it seems that Dogecoin mining is more environmentally friendly than Bitcoin mining. In fact, it’s a lot cheaper. With current power consumption, HIVE could cut countless DOGE every day. And since Dogecoin has a much lower market cap than Bitcoin, it has more wiggle room.
If Musk remains a Dogecoin partisan, the coin could really take off. And maybe miners who got in early would benefit from his ascent.
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