Beyond Bitcoin: 1 in 4 People Believe Dogecoin is the Future [Survey]

Key Takeaways:

• 45% of respondents had heard of Dogecoin, and 27.6% had invested in it.

• 30% of respondents believed that Dogecoin was the new Bitcoin.

• 48.8% of respondents regretted investing in Reddit-hyped stocks, while 40% regretted investing in Dogecoin.

• More than half of respondents were familiar with NFTs, while 40.5% had invested in NFTs.

From Dogecoin to NFTs

Bitcoin has been discounted before and still has its critics but always seems to come out on top. Even after years of disappointment, the digital currency came back stronger than ever. And with investing becoming more accessible to masses of people instead of the wealthy elite, we all want to know: What's the future of digital currency? As we saw with the GameStop story, large influxes of micro-investors have scale-tipping abilities comparable to those of established hedge funds. To better understand these scale-tippers, which we now know can hugely sway trading prices, we got to asking.

More than 1,000 people across the country recently participated in our crypto trend research. They shared with us their opinions on everything from Reddit’s influence to Dogecoin and NFTs. If you're interested in what the average American was planning to do with these investment opportunities, keep reading.

Determining the Future of Dogecoin

Dogecoin was actually started as a joke in 2013 based on a popular Shiba Inu meme. But as we know today, jokes have power in the markets. Our study kicks off with a look at Dogecoin, how many Americans have heard of it, and how they feel about Elon Musk involving himself.

While most people had heard of Dogecoin through social media (33.7%) or conversations with friends and family (21.7%), Elon Musk was single-handedly popularizing the coin as well. Eighteen percent of respondents had first heard of Dogecoin because of news covering Elon Musk's-related tweets.

Most respondents either approved of or didn't care when it came to Musk's Doge-related information. Musk's tweets show enormous support for Dogecoin. When asked if he wanted the coin available for purchase on Coinbase, he tweeted with a resounding "Yes!" moving Dogecoin almost 10% north.

Even if he meant it as a joke, we can say Dogecoin is at least considered a safer bet than the lottery –most respondents agreed that they would purchase Dogecoin over a lottery ticket, all costs being equal.

Looking Forward to Dogecoin

With Dogecoin getting so much attention on social media and from Elon Musk, we wanted to know what respondents felt the future of the currency was. They told us where they thought the price would go, what they would invest, and how it would compare to Bitcoin.

People are placing a premium on Dogecoin's meaning in their life. Instead of investing "just for fun" or even to have a safe, reliable investment, the majority of Dogecoin purchasers see this as their chance to truly "get rich." They evidently have massive faith in the price of Dogecoin to soar, as they intended to get this rich with an average investment of $227.

If Dogecoin goes up to $1 by the end of the year, however, which 23% of people thought it will, that $227 investment could be worth quite a lot, as the coin is hovering around a worth of just 5 cents at the time of writing of this article. Even with these high hopes, most people didn't see the coin as taking over Bitcoin's place. Instead, most felt Bitcoin would maintain its dominant stance in the cryptomarket.

Buying With Bitcoin and Digital Currencies

Digital currencies like Bitcoin are supposed to be exactly that: currency, or money with which to buy things. We next asked our respondents which retailers they wish accepted Dogecoin as payment.

Most people thought it would be a perk for Amazon to accept Dogecoin as payment. While other stores were considered, 41.1% of respondents said they didn't really want any stores to accept Dogecoin. Evidently, the value often lay elsewhere.

When asked, however, to consider what they would do were Amazon to release their own digital currency, the resounding answer was to invest. Sixty-four percent of respondents agreed that they would invest in Amazon's cryptocurrency. Fortunately for this group, Amazon's digital currency appears to be in the works.

Trusting in Reddit

The conversation around investing today often now leads to discourse about Reddit and memes. The next part of our study asks people what their response was to Reddit hypes and what investments they had chosen because of the platform's information.

Similarly to an Elon Musk tweet, a group of Redditors also has the power to run up the price of alt coins (like Doge) when they put their mind (and money) to it. Even though it's highly associated with meme-style investing, the Reddit community's power has certainly been proven this year. It is not at all uncommon for digital investors today to use Reddit to inform their investments as well.

Reddit's influence became unignorable with the GameStop phenomenon. The little guys from the internet were finally taking on the big hedge funds on Wall Street – and they were winning. GameStop was still the number one investment people made who took Reddit recommendations. Next was BlackBerry, which 31% of people also invested in because of Reddit. While BlackBerry was one of the biggest winners from the initial GameStop frenzy, this stock didn't have as large of a short interest as GameStop, making it harder to maintain the squeeze. The stock has fallen from $30 to around $9.

Even though people were much more likely to invest in Reddit stocks than they were Dogecoin, they were also much more likely to regret the investment. While 48.8% of respondents said they regretted their Reddit-informed stock purchases, only 40% said the same thing about Dogecoin. While most planned to shed their Reddit investments within the next six months, perhaps they had higher hopes for Dogecoin still.

Non-Fungible Tokens

Chances are the acronym NFT has come across your radar more than once recently. NFT stands for non-fungible token. "Non-fungible" means that it's unique and can't be replaced –unlike Bitcoin, which can be replaced for another Bitcoin. NFTs, like truly one-of-a-kind trading cards, are part of the Ethereum blockchain at their highest level, though some others have implemented their own forms of NFTs. The last part of our study asks respondents to weigh in on this ongoing NFT boom.

Just under half of respondents had even heard of Ethereum, though slightly more had heard of NFTs (which derive from Ethereum typically). While nearly a third couldn't provide the definition for NFTs, a whopping 61.7% of respondents planned to invest in them shortly. Women expressed particular interest in the opportunity, with 66.1% planning to invest in 2021.

While millennials were most familiar with NFTs, almost a third of baby boomers knew the concept as well. NFTs made mainstream news when Beeple's NFT sold for over $60 million at auction – the most expensive NFT sold … so far.

Trading and Trusting

Even expert traders will tell you there's no way to predict the stock market. That said, there are certainly signposts and indications along the way. In today's Reddit-influenced and digital-informed markets, some of those signposts may be the communities that have arisen. With micro-investors banning together on such massive scales for the first time, the evidence compiled here from everyday Americans may actually indicate where digital currency trends may go. There's still optimism around Dogecoin and cryptocurrency and less hype around Reddit stocks and meme choices. That said, respondents weren't willing to sell everything just yet.

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Methodology

This study uses data from a survey of 1,001 respondents familiar with cryptocurrencies located in the U.S. Survey respondents were gathered through the Amazon Mechanical Turk survey platform where they were presented with a series of questions, including attention-check and disqualification questions. 59.3% of respondents identified as men, while 40.7% identified as women. Participants incorrectly answering any attention-check question had their answers disqualified. This study has a 3% margin of error on a 95% confidence interval. 5.9% of respondents were Gen Zers, 60.8% millennials, 22.6% Gen Xers, and 10.7% baby boomers.

Please note that survey responses are self-reported and are subject to issues, such as exaggeration, recency bias, and telescoping.

Fair Use Statement

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