Enthusiastic fundraisers have raised more than 26m in Dogecoin, a joke alternative currency, which could help propel the Jamaican bobsleigh team to the 2014 Winter Olympics Much donation, so Sochi!Photograph: Photograph: secretlondon123 on flickr (CC-BY-SA).Image manipulation by Shiona Tregaskis Enthusiastic fundraisers have raised more than 26m in Dogecoin, a joke alternative currency, which could help propel the Jamaican bobsleigh team to the 2014 Winter Olympics A group of supporters has raised more than $25,000 in the internet currency Dogecoin to let the Jamaican bobsleigh team attend the Winter Olympics in Sochi.On Sunday, news broke that the team had qualified for the Winter Olympics for the first time since 2002.The two-man sled will be piloted by Winston Watt, a 46-year-old Jamaican-American who also competed in 2002, with Marvin Dixon as the brakeman.But Watt revealed that, even after putting his own money up to fly the team to his training session, there wasn't enough money to send the two to Russia.

As a result, he turned to donations, launching a PayPal account to pay for the estimated $40,000.The Jamaican bobsleigh team achieved international fame after qualifying for the 1988 Winter Olympics with a team of four men who had very little experience in the sport.That fame was boosted with the release of Cool Runnings in 1993, a loosely fictionalised account of their trials.The film remains a cult hit, and fans spread word of Watt's plight.One of them was Liam Butler, who runs the Dogecoin foundation along with the currency's initial creators Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus.Dogecoin is a crypto-currency, based on a combination of bitcoin, the popular digital money, and Doge, the internet meme that superimposes broken English written in Comic Sans onto pictures of Shiba Inu dogs."As someone who grew up in the 90's, Cool Runnings was the ultimate feel good movie about underdogs out of their element achieving their dreams," Butler told the Guardian."When I was about 7 years old, my best friend and I had a billy-cart that his dad built.

When we would start our run down his driveway, we would shout out the catchphrase from the movie: 'Feel the rhythm, feel the rhyme, get on up, it's bobsled time!'" On Monday in Sydney, where he lives, Butler launched Dogesled, aiming to raise some of the money required to send Watt and Dixon to Sochi."We started without a concrete plan in mind," Butler says."I sent a few emails out… but that was the extent of it."Within a few hours, however, the fundraiser had collected just over 26m Dogecoins.So many people had been donating, in fact, that they seemed to raise the price of the currency itself; in 12 hours, the Dogecoin to Bitcoin exchange rate rose by 50%."Myself and Jackson Palmer (the creator of Dogecoin) were at a local pub trivia in Sydney when we noticed the value of Dogecoin had more than doubled since we'd last checked so we raced back to my house to ensure we could get the best price for the donations in a form the team could actually use.As much as we have faith in Dogecoin to become the community currency of the internet, we still understand that the team need to buy their airfares in a fiat currency."

At the exchange rate Butler secured, he has $25,000 ready to send to the bobsleigh team, and the donations continue to flood in.It looks like the Jamaican bobsleigh team might be going to Sochi.• US prosecutors ponder what to do with multimillion-dollar Bitcoin hoardThe latest go-to cryptocurrency is called dogecoin, a digital denomination that began life less than two months ago as a jokey tweet made by 26-year-old Australian Jackson Palmer.But his joke has now taken on a life of its own.bitcoin ipaThe total value of the market for dogecoin (pronounced dough-je coin) has just topped $US60 million ($68 million) and it has spawned a community comprising thousands of buyers, sellers, merchants, beggars, speculators and "miners", the people who mint the money.The current value of the bitcoin market is $US10 billion.This week, transactions worth a total of $US14 million were made, including one Chinese investor who bought $US5 million worth of the virtual currency.cambiar bitcoin a usd

And on a daily basis dogecoin transactions are outstripping those in the more established bitcoin market, albeit for a smaller overall value.Mr Palmer, who is a product manager based in the Sydney office of the software company Adobe, is both amazed and elated by the experience of introducing so many newcomers to virtual economics.bitcoin pool algorithm"If the world's got a problem at the moment, it's that people don't understand how economies operate, how scarcity works.And, if by joining the dogecoin community, they gain a better appreciation, then that's great."Tocap off a frenetic January, the community has also chipped in chipped in 27 million dogecoins - or $US30,000 - to help send the Jamaican bobsled team to compete at the upcoming Sochi Winter Olympic Games.(Based on exchange rates at the time of writing, one dogecoin is equal to $US0.0018.)The Carribean team, immortalised in the 1993 movie Cool Runnings, is competing at its first Winter Games since 2002, after failing to qualify in 2006 and 2010."We're

supporting the under doges," Mr Palmer quips.While there are still question marks about the long-term viability and security of these alternative currencies, associate professor David Glance from the University of Western Australia's Centre for Software Practice, for one, believes they have a big future - especially if they gain the backing of the official banking system."Ultimately,cryptocurrencies are no more crazy than shares in terms of investments," he says."We can pretend that there is some logic behind valuations of shares but, in reality, most of it is just whim."[Dogecoin] grew a mind of its own Mr Palmer's co-conspirator is Billy Markus, a software developer at IBM, based in Portland, Oregon.They have never met in person.But, after coming across the joke website Mr Palmer cobbled together after the tweet, he suggested adapting a prototype virtual currency he had been toying with, which was based on the bitcoin DNA.At this stage, you may think that here are two smart alecs who have just invented and launched a virtual currency, so surely they must have helped themselves to a vault full of coins before opening for business.Yes, they wrote the algorithms that manage the currency and set a market capitalisation limit of 100 billion.

But on December 8, 2013, when dogecoin launched, they effectively lost control.Now the dogecoin market has become a networked, self-regulating, peer-to-peer community.These computer-generated currencies are produced through an activity known as mining where computers are used to process and solve mathematical puzzles and equations.As the currency pool grows and heads towards its capped limit, more computational power is required putting the activity outside the reach of amateurs using standard equipment.Eventually, this activity is dominated by miners using supercomputers or banks of networked computer known as server farms."That'strue virality," Mr Palmer says."[Dogecoin] grew a mind of its own."Butthat was not an issue for the founders.Mr Palmer says he and Mr Markus never intended that dogecoin get too serious or appeal to the spivs and get-rich-quick types who have gravitated more towards the bitcoin micro-economy.In part, this is due to the large following dogecoin enjoys among users of reddit, a popular website known for its diverse and socially active community.This is undoubtedly because dogecoin takes both its name and mascot from one of last year's most viral internet memes - or running jokes.The doge meme takes its name from a reference on an episode of a popular 1990s internet cartoon series called Homestar Runner.