Kabosu, the Dogecoin dog is dead – BitcoinBlog.de – the blog for Bitcoin and other virtual currencies

The Dogecoin community is in mourning: Kabosu, the Japanese Shiba Inu who gave rise to the “Doge” meme, has died at the age of 18.

Legends are immortal in spirit, but must die in the world like everyone else.

This also applies to Kabosu, the most famous dog on the internet. The Shiba Inu of a Japanese teacher died on May 24th at the ripe old age of 18 from leukemia and liver failure.

In a moving poem, her owner, Atsuko Sato, describes the dog’s last days. She ate rice, warmed herself on the windowsill in the sun’s rays and watched the birds in the garden. While her owner was petting her, she died that morning. Kabosu was the happiest dog in the world – and she, Atsuko, was the happiest dog owner in the world.

The comments on Sato’s blog are filled with sadness: “Kabuso, I can’t stop crying. I will never forget you.”

Kabosu’s career as a meme dog began in 2010, about two years after the teacher adopted her. Ms. Sato posted a photo of the dog on her blog with her arms crossed on the sofa. For some reason – no one knows exactly why – the picture spread through online forums and became a meme and the Internet dog, Doge.

The memes usually consist of images of Kabosu with text expressing her thoughts in bad English. Usually along the lines of: “Very winter, much frosty, lots of ice, wow.”

At the end of 2013, programmer Jackson Palmer, then at Adobe, developed Dogecoin. The coin was a fork of Litecoin, with more monetary units and a lottery function in the block reward. Palmer had explicitly created Dogecoin as a joke, more or less to make fun of Bitcoiners, their greed and their ideological seriousness. With Dogecoin, anyone could become a millionaire while having fun: “How Money, So crypto, Many Coins, Much Wow!”

Dogecoin became an unexpected hit. Even after Palmer left the crypto community in 2015, the forums and communities around Dogecoin remained active. People posted funny memes, gifted each other hundreds of thousands of Dogecoins, and exuded a fun, light-hearted energy that was refreshingly different from the often deadly serious nature of the Bitcoin scene.

To everyone’s amazement, Dogecoin has remained tougher and more enduring than many, many other coins from the same period. In late 2013 and early 2014, hundreds of altcoins emerged, at least 95 percent of which have sunk into absolute insignificance today. Dogecoin has somehow managed to survive and maintain a relatively favorable position in the cryptocurrency rankings. A meme is more than just fun – it has intrinsic value.

A milestone was the year 2021, when none other than Elon Musk touted Dogecoin as “the people’s cryptocurrency” and his favorite coin. After Musk took over Twitter, he even replaced the Twitter icon with the Dogecoin logo – Kabosu’s face – for a short time. Teacher Mrs. Sato, now 62 years old, was not even particularly surprised by this. She was used to her dog becoming so famous.

There is even a statue of Ms. Sato and Kabosu in a park in the Japanese city of Sakura, funded by a crowdfunding campaign last November. Sato and her allies have donated to charities in keeping with the human- and animal-friendly Doge ideology; the largest crypto donation of $1 million to Save the Children was not coincidentally made in Dogecoin.

At this point, one can only wish the teacher all the best and be happy to live in a world in which a friendly, playful dog became so popular simply because she was there – and enriched the crypto world with positive energy and the genre of memecoins.

Or, to quote another comment on Sato’s blog: “Kabuso, thank you very much!
You were born to spread love to everyone in the world. I have loved you forever. Have fun running and playing in rainbow land.”