| The year was 2013: the first big crypto boom. Bitcoin started the year around $13, and skyrocketed to $1,100 by December. In response, many entrepreneurs began launching alternatives to bitcoin -- Litecoin, Ripple, Peercoin -- with their “altcoins” quickly making millions. In the midst of this madness, two guys launched the world’s most valuable joke. Billy Markus was an IBM software engineer, and Jackson Palmer was a developer at Adobe. Since all these new altcoins were based on open-source code, it was a simple matter for the duo to launch their own version of Litecoin, tweak a few variables, and call it Dogecoin. It was a parody of everything happening in crypto: a token with no good use, with the ridiculous Doge meme as a mascot (see above). But the joke was on them: people started to buy DOGE, running the near-worthless token from $0.00026 to $0.00095. Billions of Dogecoins were being traded each day: a month after it launched, Dogecoin was briefly traded more than all other cryptocurrencies combined. Today, their parody coin has a very real market capitalization of $21 billion, which must make it the most valuable joke in the world.
In today's guide, we'll give you some common-sense principles for buying memecoins, which can be summed up in two words.
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