In December 2013, software engineers Billy Marcus and Jackson Palmer unleashed Dogecoin on the world

With a website and wallet (and a hefty dose of Comic Sans) based on the face of a Shiba Inu from the meme "Doge," Dogecoin quickly gained traction for its absurdity Seven years later, it has had its official day (Dogeday 4/20) and has solidly outperformed bitcoin over the past week

Earlier today, the price of a single Doge rose 18% to 42 cents This is just shy of the coin's all-time high of 45 cents achieved late last week Meanwhile, Bitcoin fell 46% this morning to trade at $54,76319, and Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency, also fell 53% to trade at $2,134 DOGE has since fallen to 35 cents (at time of writing), but from its roughly 9-cent value just one week ago It is still far up

We seem to have entered a twilight-zone absurd period of unpredictable financial turbulence, but there are several ways to go about this madness Somewhat

For example, a single tweet from a socially influential figure like Elon Musk can send prices skyrocketing and people buying everything from Dogecoin to NFTs purely "for a laugh"

Mr Mask, incidentally, is one of the main reasons for Dogecoin's recent surge in popularity: in January, it rose over 800% to $007 in just 24 hours This was inspired in part by reddit's GameStop short squeeze movement, but also by Mr Mask's tweet to his 516 million followers of a photo of a Vogue magazine cover parody called Dogue Yes, really

Factor in the fact that Dogeday falls on 4/20 (a recognized holiday for marijuana enthusiasts) and its overall value is on par with Dell, and you really start to think anything is possible

Sites like Reddit and Twitter continue to urge people to buy DOGE in hopes of raising its price to $1 And given the events of the last few months, I'm honestly not surprised they've succeeded; the people who were shouting "DOGE to the moon" seven years ago are no doubt enjoying this crazy increase the most