My partner, the Dogecoin mogul

We bought a beaut of a truck this summer: a second-hand, barn-red Nissan Frontier with a cab that fits four and a cargo bed big enough for stacks of plywood sheets. During the pandemic my partner, Richard, started a business restoring old houses, so he needed a spacious pickup. Our purchase was unremarkable – except that we paid for it with Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that had little value or prominence at the start of the year.

Cryptocurrencies exist only online and Dogecoin is part of a jokey subgenre of these digital currencies, known as memecoins. Whereas Bitcoin, the world’s first cryptocurrency, was created in 2009 with the libertarian goal of circumventing the authority of central banks and nation states, Dogecoin was set up in 2013 as a parody of the ongoing crypto frenzy.