I remember it so clearly. I was sitting at my desk, procrastinating on a work project, and scrolling through Twitter. Everyone was talking about this thing called Dogecoin. At first, I just ignored it. It seemed ridiculous. A coin with a Shiba Inu dog on it? For real? I was a total crypto newbie back then. All I knew was Bitcoin was the big deal, and everything else seemed like a scam.
But the chatter kept growing. People were posting memes, talking about “to the moon,” and there was this infectious, fun energy around it. My curiosity finally got the better of me. I figured, “What’s the harm in throwing a little bit of cash at it?” I had an extra fifty bucks from a freelance gig, so I decided to just go for it.
The process of actually buying it was a whole thing. I had to set up a new wallet, figure out which exchange to use, and navigate a bunch of weird jargon I didn’t understand. It was like learning a new language just to buy a picture of a dog. But I did it. I bought my first few hundred Dogecoin and just sat there, looking at the number in my wallet, feeling a mix of foolishness and excitement.
Honestly, for a while, nothing much happened. The price barely moved. Then, all of a sudden, it started climbing. I’d check my phone every five minutes. A little bit of a jump. Another jump. I remember seeing my fifty dollars turn into a hundred, then two hundred. I was totally hooked. It was an adrenaline rush unlike anything I had ever experienced. I started telling all my friends about it, trying to get them to join in the fun.
What I didn’t realize back then was that this wasn’t really about smart investing. It was about community, a shared joke, and the pure thrill of a lottery ticket. The price would swing wildly, up one day, down the next. I learned the hard way that a lot of these projects are based on hype and emotion, not on solid fundamentals. I made some money, but I also lost some on other coins that promised the moon but went nowhere.
It was a wild ride, and I learned so much more about the crypto world from that one silly coin than I ever did from reading a bunch of technical whitepapers. It taught me to be cautious, but also to appreciate the weird, wonderful, and sometimes absurd parts of technology. Looking back, that first fifty-dollar bet was one of the best “mistakes” I’ve ever made.
The Day I Tried to Explain Meme Coins to My Parents was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.