Dogecoin Co-Creator Takes Swipe At Elon Musk, Calls Him ‘Grifter’, But Deletes The Tweet Later.
Jackson Palmer, one of the co-creators of Dogecoin, slammed Elon Musk, who has often supported the meme currency on Twitter, leading to a massive surge in its value over the past few months. Palmer tweeted that the Tesla CEO was a “self-absorbed grifter” and also lashed out at Musk’s Saturday Night Live (SNL) appearance as “cringe.” The tech tycoon had called Dogecoin a “hustle” during one of his gigs on the popular TV show, following which the digital currency started a downward spiral but soon stabilized.
However, Palmer also said that he would delete his tweets criticizing Musk in “one minute,” and he did that.
Dogecoin Creator Jackson Palmer Criticizes Cryptocurrency.
Dogecoin co-creator Jackson Palmer isn’t on social media much. After nuking his YouTube channel and turning his Twitter account private back in mid-2019, the software engineer hadn’t made a peep on the platforms at all, not even when prices for his meme-y crypto reached record highs earlier this year.
However, that blackout ended today when Palmer briefly resurfaced on Twitter with an important reminder: cryptocurrency’s a scam and always has been.
“After years of studying it, I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology built primarily to amplify the wealth of its proponents through a combination of tax avoidance, diminished regulatory oversight, and artificially enforced scarcity,” he tweeted out on Wednesday afternoon.
Read Why bitcoin is going down?
Cryptocurrencies, generally, have had a hell of a year. Bitcoin, the most well-known of the bunch, saw its price peak at over $63,000 in mid-April before crashing a month later to the mid-$30,000s. Dogecoin, meanwhile, rode the crypto boom “to the moon,” as they say, jumping from about $0.06 per dogecoin to over $0.68 per coin, then similarly plunged to somewhere in the middle. The entire time, of course, the value of crypto at all remained debatable.
A few days ago, Musk had put out a Tesla statement that the electric vehicle manufacturer was suspending payments in Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency because he was “concerned” about the rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transaction. Tesla had invested $1.5 billion (roughly Rs. 10,990 crores) in Bitcoin earlier this year.
Later, he also said that he was working with the developers of Dogecoin, the fourth-largest crypto, to improve “system transaction efficiency.”
It was not immediately clear if Palmer’s reactions resulted from Musk’s tweet where he said that though he believed in cryptocurrency, “it can’t drive a massive increase in fossil fuel use.”
A Twitter user then asked him whether he considered energy consumption when he and Palmer created the meme currency. Markus replied that Dogecoin was created in “like two hours,” and they “did not consider anything.”
The Bottom Line
This isn’t the first time Palmer had railed against cryptocurrencies. After dogecoin reached a market cap of $2 billion in 2017, he wrote in Vice that “something is very wrong,” and that the crypto industry had been hijacked by “scammers and opportunists.”
Things have only gotten crazier since then. Though it has lost about two-thirds of its value since its May peak, dogecoin DOGEUSD, -2.28% is still up more than 4,100% year to date, with a current market cap above $28 billion.
Both Palmer and Markus stepped away from dogecoin years ago. But while Markus is still active in the crypto world, Palmer is done. In the 2017 Vice article, Palmer said he ended his involvement with dogecoin and crypto in 2015 and donated his proceeds to charity. And don’t ask him about it again — Palmer’s tweet-thread Wednesday began: “I am often asked if I will ‘return to cryptocurrency’ or begin regularly sharing my thoughts on the topic again. My answer is a wholehearted ‘no.”
