Dog-themed meme coins like Dogecoin (CRYPTO:DOGE) can be funny. Its gain of 7,300% during the past five years is not funny. Nor is it amusing for investors who bought the coin at the peak of its popularity and who have been deeply underwater ever since.

The question for investors today is simple: After all that volatility, is this meme coin still worth thinking about buying? Surprisingly, the answer to that question is "yes," but that doesn't mean it's worth actually pulling the trigger.

Why Dogecoin is worth understanding

As the first meme coin to go to the moon, Dogecoin has a special place in the crypto ecosystem as shown by its market cap of $28.5 billion.

With so much capital parked in the coin, it will probably still be as viable in 10 years as it is today. That doesn't mean you should be racing to buy it. But it does mean that it is reasonable to evaluate as an investment with a bit more attentiveness than the average meme coin.

Image source: Getty Images.

First, let's take a look at its supply. Dogecoin mints a fixed 5 billion coins every year, with no cap on its total issuance; there are currently around 149.5 billion DOGE in circulation. That perpetual inflation means long-term holders depend on demand always outpacing the coin's expanding float, or the coins available for pubic trading -- a tall order for an asset that offers no staking yield or token burn mechanism. In other words, by default, holding it for the long term just results in your value getting diluted more and more over time.

Those drawbacks mesh with the main problem with Dogecoin. It began as a joke coin and never pivoted because the original developer abandoned the project and because there was no roadmap for features to add to the coin. There is no formal foundation behind it, no clear product vision, and no moat beyond community enthusiasm, which tends to be fickle.

That leads us to the last point to appreciate. Its price catalysts remain completely external and unpredictable. When Elon Musk or another celebrity says something about holding or buying Dogecoin, it might cause the price to spike. Obviously, that's not anything that a serious investor can plan around. Furthermore, during a speculative frenzy, the coin's price can reasonably be expected to rise -- but it's impossible to know when the music is going to stop, which makes it very difficult to properly time an exit from a position.

In short, there's no intrinsic value here beyond the Dogecoin brand. And there's not really any mechanism by which that brand value can increase or be expected to increase in the future.

Don't sleep on these takeaways

While buying a lottery ticket might scratch the same speculative itch as buying Dogecoin, allocating meaningful retirement capital is hard to justify. Investors looking for long-term compounding of their cryptocurrency investments are likely better served by assets with hard supply caps, active developer communities, and real-world utility, or at least some features that can be expected to change in a way that could generate some value for holders.

Nonetheless, Dogecoin can still serve a purpose, primarily for investor education.

It illustrates the reflexive relationship between sentiment and price, why unlimited supply suppresses an asset's intrinsic value, and how liquidity injections from retail traders can overpower weak fundamentals in the short run but not in the long run. Similarly, it's a good example of the kind of asset that tends to see wild run-ups during periods of widespread financial speculation, and also a good example of the ferocious hangovers such periods tend to cause when they inevitably end.

Appreciating each of these lessons deeply will make you a better investor in stocks as well as in cryptocurrencies. And that's why Dogecoin is still worth a look today even if it is not worth buying.