As much as it makes sense to reference Japanese money at Japanese culture conventions, I’ve stuck to dogecoin for most of my game shows that deal with dollar values. The one I prominently use it with is Wheel of Fortune, but I’ve also used it for Millionaire and my variant of Press Your Luck. My original reasons for using dogecoin were twofold: the inherent goofiness of the cryptocurrency allows me to stand out from anyone who uses the yen, plus when I started using it in 2014, a million dogecoin was around $100-200, which meant I could throw out ridiculously large numbers but stay within my budgetary needs.
That may need to change soon. While the strength of dogecoin has been on the rise for about four weeks, this weekend the price has skyrocketed. From mid-2014 to early this year, 1 dogecoin had been worth about 0.01 or 0.02 cents. (Yes, we are talking about 1-2% of one penny.) Over the past 24 hours, that same dogecoin has been trading as high as 0.78 cents. Just to put that in perspective, the weakest the yen has been during that same time frame is 0.80, although it’s currently trading around 0.89.
With my next game show still a month away, I’ve made some adjustments to my games in the hope that there is a regression to the mean, but what happens if there isn’t a regression? What happens if dogecoin overtakes the yen in terms of purchasing power? To be honest, I’m not sure. Wheel is probably my favorite game to do at conventions within driving distance, and that will be the most adversely affected game. Do I go back into the archives and pull out Wheel values that haven’t been around since before most attendees were born? (This is a friendly reminder that Wheel has not been a daytime network show since 1991.) Do I start transitioning back to lecture panels and comedy? I don’t know, and hopefully I won’t have to.
