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Sign up to our free weekly IndyTech newsletter delivered straight to your inboxSign up to our free IndyTech newsletterFor a cryptocurrency<\/a> originally conceived as a joke, a satire against bitcoin<\/a> and the whole crazed online gold rush of the last decade, Dogecoin<\/a> has had an absolutely extraordinary year.In late January, its value skyrocketed by 800 per cent in 24 hours to $0.07 as Reddit<\/a> users and tech entrepreneur Elon Musk<\/a> roped it into the GameStop<\/a> short squeeze battle to thwart Wall Street traders attempting to capitalise on the downfall of the beloved high street retailer.Dogecoin continued to climb gradually throughout the spring, hitting $0.45 by mid-April, thanks in no small part to the cheerleading of eccentric self-styled celebrity investment gurus like Musk, Snoop Dogg<\/a> and ex-Kiss frontman Gene Simmons<\/a>, before hitting an all-time high of $0.72 on 5 May and registering a market capitalisation of $85.3bn.>> Follow all the latest bitcoin updates with\u00a0The Independent\u2019s\u00a0live coverage of the crypto market<\/a>At the time of writing, it\u2019s worth about half of that, but honestly, who knows where this volatile proposition will go from here? If you ask Musk, he will say there\u2019s no reason it can\u2019t become the future currency of Mars.The coin was launched on 6 December 2013 by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, of IBM and Adobe respectively, who based their spoof of the cryptocraze on the dominant meme of the moment: a Shiba Ibu dog posing quizzically for the camera.The photograph had blown up over the last three years, spreading across the web and pleasingly imagining the animal\u2019s inner monologue, expressed in ungrammatical Comic Sans annotations (\u201cWow such tempt\u201d), its face sometimes superimposed absurdly onto inanimate objects like Twinkies, stacks of Pringles or giant boulders.The face that launched a thousand memes (Reddit)Accelerated by the popularity of the Shiba Confessions<\/a> Tumblr started in June 2012, the meme would eventually become so widely known that even Republican congressman for Texas Steve Stockman was using it to lampoon his own party\u2019s state senator John Cornyn<\/a> for being insufficiently right-wing (\u201cWow support Obamacare funding\u201d) by the time Markus and Palmer\u2019s coin was unveiled.Dogecoin would swiftly draw together a community that was originally dedicated to prank fundraising, making enough money to send a Jamaican bobsleigh team to the Sochi Winter Olympics and to sponsor Nascar driver Josh Wise, as well as bankrolling worthier initiatives like bringing water to drought-stricken communities in Kenya. The picture on which all of this was centred turned out to have been first uploaded on 23 February 2010 by the dog\u2019s owner, Japanese nursery school teacher Atsuko Sato, who had started a blog<\/a> eight months earlier to post regular updates about her pet, christened Kabosu for its face shaped like the round citrus fruit of the same name, whom she had adopted in November 2008 after the puppy mill the dog had been born into was shut down.The original photo used in the doge meme was part of a series (CC\/ Kobachan.blog)Her blog, also featuring the family\u2019s cats Azalea, Ginkgo and Onigir lounging around their apartment in suburban Tokyo, is still running to this day and remains hugely popular.Kabosu is not the only Shiba to appear in the meme though. Sometimes a photo of another dog named Suki, looking elegant in a fetching pink scarf and owned by San Francisco-based photographer Jonathan Fleming, appeared instead when a haughtier tone was needed.Speaking to The Verge in 2013<\/a> at the height of the meme\u2019s popularity, Sato described her reaction when she first became aware of how popular her faithful friend had become in the west.\u201cI was taken aback. It felt very strange to see her face there. It was a Kabosu that I didn\u2019t know,\u201d she said.\u201cTo be honest, some pictures are strange for me, but it\u2019s still funny! I\u2019m very impressed with their skills and taste. Around me, nobody knows about the doge meme. Maybe I don\u2019t understand memes very well, because I\u2019m living such an analogue life.\u201dOn why Kabosu in particular had proved to be so appealing to the online community, Sato suggested that her pet \u201cis very different from the typical temperament of Shiba. She\u2019s very gentle and calm; she loves being photographed.\u201dKabosu is often pictured and filmed with her pet pals (YouTube\/ ???????????)Shiba Inu are known as a highly energetic breed of traditional hunting dog in Japan, so the Dogecoin icon certainly appears to be an exception to the rule.Kabosu \u201cwas not loved when she was little, so I want to shower her with love as a member of my family\u201d, her owner said, explaining that she originally started her blog to raise awareness about the dubious ethics of commercial breeding operations like the one from which her pet and 19 other Shibas had sprung.Rather cruelly, China Central Television ran a hoax story announcing the death of Kabosu on April Fools\u2019 Day 2017, perhaps in the hope of causing a ripple in the cryptocurrency markets, but the truth is that the world\u2019s most famous Shiba Inu is still alive and well at the grand old age of 15, presumably blissfully unaware of her improbable crypto celebrity.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n