Dumb article time because I get asked it a lot. No, it has nothing to do with Satan.
A long time ago (2013, almost a decade now... sheesh) I joined my first IRC channel on Freenode (now Libera) - #teamdoge. This was a mining pool, a basic MPOS (Massive Piece of Shit? No! Mining Portal, Open Source) installation with a dedicated little community where I mined my first dogecoins ever. Their web IRC gateway assigned a name of Teamdoge, an underscore, and four random numbers. The day I showed up, that RNG provided me my name. Teamdoge_7666.
I was using HydraIRC after graduating from the web portal with a tacky black/green color scheme on the first proper laptop I ever owned, an XPS 17 (L702x) at the time, in my parent's place. This laptop, overclocked to the gills, mined at their pool, making a tidy sum of memecoins. From there, I forged an identity and became known as a helpful regular at the place. After a year or so, I even managed to take over at some point with some of the original admins, although we had generally no clue what we were doing. That was when NOMP (Node Open Mining Portal) became a big thing and kicked all the MPOS pools to the curb. At some point, the fun ended when we didn't pull through making a new pool and that was that. When I moved beyond #teamdoge, I truncated that part and just kept the number 7666. And don't worry - I'm not a crypto bro anymore. I got out of that game a long time ago when the general public moved in.
It's a strange origin story, but I can't tell you how thankful I am that I decided to stop by that tiny channel. One of the most formative experiences of my life. There's still Dogecoin crap in my parents' place, and I still remember the look on my Dad's face when I helped stick that stupid meme coin on the side of a NASCAR since he always watched the races. That was the Josh Wise thing. He loved it.
And no, I didn't get rich from Dogecoin. I had a million or so back in 2015 that I should have kept, but I sold them for $300 because I needed the money to keep going through college at the time. That haul would have been worth something like a quarter million bucks at Dogecoin's semi-recent height. Oh well.
Anyway, that's the story. I guess it's too late to change now, because it's pretty hard to say out loud and you could argue that devolving yourself to a number makes you sound like a prisoner or something.