What if you bought Dogecoin in 2015?
Crypto · Meme. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play750.0× · S&P 500 same money: $3,301
$1,000 in Dogecoin at the start of 2015 would be worth about $750,000 today — 750.0 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Dogecoin was created in December 2013 by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer as a joke, a parody of the cryptocurrency craze featuring the Shiba Inu dog meme. It had no cap on supply, no serious roadmap and a community best known for tipping and charity drives. It nonetheless rode every crypto wave: from a fraction of a cent in 2015 it rose roughly fortyfold by early 2018, then gave much of that back.
The real fuel was celebrity. In 2021 Elon Musk repeatedly tweeted about it, retail traders fresh from GameStop piled in, and the price rose by thousands of percent, peaking around his Saturday Night Live appearance in May 2021, during which it fell. After the hype faded it lost most of its value, but it never quite went away; Musk's prominence after the 2024 US election, including the cost-cutting initiative cheekily named the Department of Government Efficiency, kept the name in the news. Measured from 2015, few assets turned $1,000 into more, which is either an indictment of markets or a tribute to the power of a good meme.
The lesson: An asset with no cash flows is worth whatever the next buyer believes, which makes celebrity attention a genuine, if fickle, input to its price.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | $0.0002 | $750,000 | $3,301 |
| 2018 | $0.009 | $16,667 | $2,519 |
| 2020 | $0.002 | $75,000 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2015, turning $1,000 into $750,000. The S&P 500 from that same year: $3,301.
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Dogecoin is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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