Today is 4/20, the day that has become an unofficial pot-smoking holiday. For some reason Dogecoin, the not-really-a-cryptocurrency cryptocurrency, has become associated with this not-really-a-holiday holiday. At one stage this morning Dogecoin traded at 42 cents, which was probably very exciting to anyone that gets excited about stuff like this. Joe has written something in his paragraph below if you have to know more.

The crypto market has had one of its standard bouts of volatility over the last few days, but as this table from CoinMarketCap shows clearly, of the top five biggest coins, one coin really stands out.

That’s right. Doge has just been in its own universe, and honestly it’s really great to see because it’s the perfect thing to make everyone annoyed.

For the Cryptoskeptic Nocoiner, it’s just more evidence that the coin thing is a scam or a bubble or a Ponzi scheme that will eventually end in tears.

And for the people who demand that everyone take crypto really seriously, it’s an awkward embarrassment. Mike Novogratz of Galaxy Digital, for example, told Bloomberg that he’d be worried if one of his friends had invested in Dogecoin.

See all the serious stuff about decentralized finance, or stores of value, or people thirsting for an alternative to the dollar. Nobody can talk about it with a straight face when it comes to Dogecoin. I mean, sure you could probably intellectualize the whole thing by finding some quote from Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens about how money has always been a shared meme blah blah blah. But really, all the crypto talking points go out the window with Doge.

There’s a lot of self congratulation in crypto. Bitcoiners who have made an extraordinary sum of money in a short period of time love to talk about how they’re taking on the Fed, or taking on the banks, or enabling some kind of peaceful revolution that will bring freedom to people all over the world. Basically Dogecoin is like Bitcoin stripped of the virtue signaling.

And to be crystal clear, Dogecoin has been a better investment than Bitcoin for its entire existence. Here’s a chart, again from CoinMarketCap, of Dogecoin priced in Bitcoin. Doge/BTC is at all-time highs. What this means — just so there’s no ambiguity — is that at every step of the way if you bought Bitcoin, you should have bought Dogecoin instead in retrospect. That’s not cherry picking or a chart crime or anything. It’s just a fact that at any time over the last seven years, buying Dogecoin was the better move than buying Bitcoin.