Why are so many coins released? Quite simply, most coins are forks of Bitcoin/Litecoin/etc with minor tweaks. Occasionally, you get a truly new coin based on something new, but most simply tweak the coins per block, the difficulty re-targeting rate, the starting difficulty, the block time, etc. Coingen.io exemplifies how simple this is. Of course, there are exceptions, such as the upcoming Etherium [2], the first Turing complete cryptocurrency (as far as I know, at least).
Despite that, most coins basically fail. Sure, they receive hashing power, and some even get onto exchanges. Most of them, however, don't really go anywhere.
So, yes, it is relatively easy to create and launch a coin. It is a bit harder to launch a coin that makes it to an exchange. It is harder still to make one that also sticks around and stays in the public consciousness (such as dogecoin).
Finally, let's say you have a great idea for a new coin. The way some people previously got rich by creating a new coin was to premine the coin. Basically, one would mine the first x number of blocks, before releasing it. This still happens, but is now much more often frowned upon. So, to get rich off of creating a coin, you basically would need to premine a coin, and convince others that you had a good reason to premine it [3]. This absolutely still happens, but is becoming tougher to pull off.
So yes, you could create aarondfcoin. Yes, you could probably release it and get hashing power thrown at it. But, would you make money doing so? Well, that requires a bit more effort. Keep in mind that there are hundreds of attempted alt currencies for every dogecoin success.
That said, yes, there is still room for success here, but it usually requires more than just creating aarondfcoin. The virality aspect is the more important aspect, at the moment.
[1] See the bitcointalk announcement forum https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=159.0
[2] http://ethereum.org/ and the whitepaper: http://ethereum.org/ethereum.html
[3] Yes, there are a still a number of ways to make money off of releasing a coin that doesn't involve premining (or appears not to involve premining), but that is a topic worthy of its own thread.
Litecoin apparently was one of few altcoins to avoid premining that is everyone (who followed BTC forums that is) got off on equal footing.
To me the funny thing is there is enough consternation over this to have an official term for it.
Satoshi, whether a group or individual, invented Bitcoin and planted the seeds for its success against all odds. Now that it's huge everyone is regretting not getting in early, but I see no reason why the creators and early adopters don't deserve their spoils.
It's nice that Litecoin decided to start everyone on equal footing, but let's not fool ourselves: that's an adoption tactic not altruism. At the end of the day Litecoin is the most successful of the copycat digital currencies but it's still a copycat.
If this cryptocurrency survives, it will be uneconomical to mine by the commoners sometime this year.
Dogecoin is like any other currency. The things that make it useful are belief and people willing to exchange things for it. It's unlike other currencies in that mostly the things being exchanged are electronic and not worth meatspacecoin.
There is, of course, no reason it has to stay that way.
But yes you can create your own cryptocurrency and make a lot of money off of it. This is a good and a bad thing. Good because it should create competition to make better cryptocurrencies. It also helps build the currency as all the miners invest resources in it and get exposed to the currency and have an incentive to try to get others to use it. Bad because, well that money is coming from somewhere, and the users of the cryptocurrency are essentially paying a tax to the miners for not really contributing anything of value.
I'm not ready to say DOGE will win the cryptocurrency wars, but it certainly wouldn't the first time that a "joke" or "hack" turned into something real and lasting.
Now that people are trying to copy dogecoin it's going to be a lot harder to have that slow ramp.
Dogecoin is special because it was first, and the early community built a loving friendly place. People like friendly doges.
People love it because it started as a joke that they themselves were in on. And then the joke became real.
If you premined the coin you could theoretically cash out about half of that value, and the minute after the coin would be dead.
Could I start an aarondfcoin? Is it all about getting the network effect to make a non-backed (fiat) currency actually worth something?
I was just so shocked to see that Dogecoin was actually worth anything.