A strange phenomenon where billions of dollars are poured into coins that are represented by pictures of dogs, often Shiba Inu dogs, and have very few additional properties or benefits. The first dog coin was Doge coin which was started as a joke and abandoned by its creator. Nevertheless, it has a market cap in the tens of billions of dollars and in true crypto fashion has been copied hundreds if not thousands of times by other dog coins. Elon Musk is responsible for most of the speculation around dog coins due to his constant posting about Dogecoin and owning a Shiba Inu.

The OG daddy of all dog coins is Doge coin which was started as a joke and was abandoned by its creator. It is known as a meme coin, because its visual identity is based on a Shiba Inu dog from a meme and has no other real utility. It is a fork of Bitcoin so is pretty much identical except it is inflationary and uses a weaker form of cryptographic security. Nevertheless, it has a market cap in the tens of billions of dollars and in true crypto fashion has been copied hundreds if not thousands of times by other dog coins. Elon Musk is known as the Dogefather because of his relentless shilling of Dogecoin on Twitter and other media.

ETH is shorthand for Ether. It is the second largest digital currency by market cap apart from Bitcoin. It's common for noobs to mix up Ethereum and ETH. Ethereum is the blockchain while ETH is the network's native token. An even more noob mistake is to confuse it with Ethereum classic, which is the old fork of Ethereum and is not really maintained. ETH is the lifeblood of Ethereum. When you send ETH or use an Ethereum application (dApp), you pay network fees called gas in ETH. The fee incentivizes network miners to process and verify transactions. ETH can be divided up to 18 decimal places so you don't have to buy 1 whole ETH. For e.g. you can buy as little as 0.000000000000000001 ETH if you want.