My newest guilty pleasure is Dogecoin. It started out as a parody of Bitcoin, but people are having a good deal more fun with it:

It doesn’t feel like the early days of BTC, where everyone was overly serious and freaking out about every tiny bump or dip, where scam sites were popping up left and right, and no one trusted anyone. There was a level of pretentiousness and defensiveness that was a lot of things, but it was NOT fun.

This is fun.

/u/sickhippie

Dogecoin is more like digital play money, and the community around it is consequently more generous and jovial.

Mining works the same way as with Bitcoin. I downloaded a mining program on Tuesday evening and signed up at fast-pool, and so far have mined about 1,600 coins using a fairly standard desktop machine in the night hours.

If you missed out on Bitcoin, now’s the time to get into doge, although probably not for the same reasons. The most earnest attempt at a back-of-the-envelope analysis I’ve seen so far estimates the eventual value of 1 Dogecoin to be $0.20 USD on the high end. Perfect, in other words, for casual online tippage.

Read more at Business Insider and The Verge.