Dogecoin's market value exceeds 80 billion, but the founder only made enough to buy a used Honda and is still working as an employee

This article is from the public account Silicon Star, author: Juny, editor: Vicky Xiao.

In every crazy market, there is always that one craziest focus, and this year's focus must undoubtedly be Dogecoin.

Since the beginning of 2021, Dogecoin has risen over 11,000%, standing tall in the capital market, trampling on so-called leaders like Bitcoin and Tesla. Its market capitalization has now surpassed that of both Twitter and Ford, creating a wealth frenzy for countless retail investors.

Nowadays, whenever Dogecoin is mentioned, the first person people think of is its "promotional ambassador" Elon Musk, but few know that its developer is named Billy Markus.

Musk and Markus, these two crucial figures for Dogecoin, sound like two brothers, but their Dogecoin journeys are completely different: one is making crazy money with Dogecoin to build rockets and preparing to take it to Mars, while the other sold all his shares when Dogecoin was about $0.0001 in 2015 and used the money to buy a used Toyota.

Who would have thought that today, when Dogecoin's market value once exceeded $80 billion, its inventor is still just an ordinary worker? Fate is truly elusive.

Image from Marketwatch, the abandoned Dogecoin by the "dads"

There are two founders of Dogecoin: its developer Billy Markus and its conceptual initiator Jackson Palmer. However, both sold all their Dogecoin holdings in 2015 and closed their personal social media accounts, withdrawing from the "Dogecoin world."

Today, Jackson Palmer works as a product manager in the growth and data science department at Adobe in San Francisco, where he has been employed for nearly 12 years. On his LinkedIn page, there is no mention that he is the now-hot Dogecoin initiator, nor any trace of Dogecoin.

Image screenshot from Jackson Palmer's LinkedIn

Like Palmer, Billy Markus is also still a "worker." He currently works as a software engineer at an education company in the San Francisco Bay Area, and there is hardly any real personal social media information about him online.

"I no longer own any cryptocurrencies, including Dogecoin. Now I am just an ordinary office worker, not in trouble, but also not wealthy," Markus said in an interview with Bloomberg earlier this year.

In 2015, under the pressure of unemployment, Markus sold all his Dogecoin. He used the money from the sale to buy himself a used Honda Civic. At that time, a Dogecoin was priced at about $0.0001, so even at the $6,000 price of the used Honda, Markus must have held over 60 million Dogecoins. If he hadn't sold them back then, today those Dogecoins would be worth over $36 million.

But in the eyes of Markus and Palmer, who "abandoned" Dogecoin, the crazy rise of Dogecoin is irrational, even bizarre. They remind everyone to be cautious when trading and warn of the huge volatility involved.

In February of this year, Markus returned to the Dogecoin community on Reddit to post a long letter.

In the letter, he stated that although he had left Dogecoin for many years, he still wanted to tell people that their original intention in creating Dogecoin was not to incite wild speculation but to bring more positive impacts to the world, such as promoting charity or other interesting developments.

After Dogecoin became an overnight sensation, things gradually deviated from the original track. He and Palmer received a lot of harassment from cryptocurrency fanatics, with people frantically messaging them across various channels, urging them to use their influence and holdings to pump the price. Eventually, both were overwhelmed and decided to distance themselves from this out-of-control battlefield.

"The world is already tough; these behaviors can only bring more negative impacts. As founders, having seen so much over the past seven years, I am not angry, just disappointed," Markus wrote in the open letter.

Now, Markus only engages in Dogecoin community activities online under his pseudonym Shibetoshi Nakamoto, which he created in homage to Satoshi Nakamoto, continuing to raise funds for some absurd but interesting causes.

For example, they once sponsored a race car in the name of Dogecoin, with the iconic Dogecoin image printed on it, making it the most eye-catching sight at the NASCAR event. They also raised funds with Dogecoin for the Jamaican bobsled team, helping them realize their dream of competing in the Sochi Winter Olympics.

Image from Reddit

Additionally, Dogecoin has played a role in many charitable causes, such as helping raise research funds to address drinking water pollution in West Virginia, funding the establishment of dog protection associations, and building wells for local people in Africa.

"This year we also launched an initiative called #DoOnlyGoodEveryday, abbreviated as DOGE, which has already received responses from over 75 million people. I hope Dogecoin can create more interesting impacts beyond speculation in 2021." Recently, Markus also jumped on the trend, starting to develop and sell NFT versions of Dogecoin cards.

The DOGE initiative launched by Markus in March of this year, image screenshot from Twitter

However, in terms of investment, Markus, who created an $80 billion emerging asset, appears particularly cautious.

"Since I exited in 2015, I haven't bought or sold Dogecoin. Most of my investments are now in S&P 500 index funds and automated investment accounts like Wealthfront."

The creator of Dogecoin, however, does not believe in Dogecoin, which may seem difficult to understand. But once you learn the story behind their creation of Dogecoin, everything might make sense.

Born to mock Bitcoin

Many people might find the name Dogecoin amusing when they first hear it, wondering why it was named that way and why it uses a dog meme as its logo, feeling like it’s just a joke.

The truth is, it indeed started as a joke. The original intention of Dogecoin's creation was not to become a valuable and circulating digital currency; rather, it was born to satirize Bitcoin.

In 2013, there were two particularly hot topics on the internet: one was that the previously obscure Bitcoin suddenly entered a period of rapid price increase, soaring from a few dollars to dozens of dollars in a very short time, leaving everyone astonished. The other was a meme called Doge featuring a Shiba Inu that became a viral sensation, with people sharing this dog meme to express various indescribable emotions like "wow," "speechless," and "irony."

These two internet phenomena collided that year. At a time when people had almost no understanding of digital currencies, the soaring price of Bitcoin and the emergence of various altcoins broke the norm, and the Doge meme flew around in people's posts and comments.

At this time, Jackson Palmer, a marketing specialist in Adobe's Sydney office, came up with a playful idea: he decided to create a digital currency using the Doge meme to mock the speculative atmosphere surrounding digital currencies at the time. He then tweeted:

"Invest in Dogecoin, I'm sure it will be the next big thing."

Unexpectedly, this tweet garnered a lot of enthusiastic attention from netizens. Palmer thought, since this was the case, why not take the joke to the end? So he bought the domain Dogecoin.com and uploaded an image of a coin featuring the Doge meme. On the website, he left a message saying, "If you want Dogecoin to become a reality, please contact me."

This website quickly caught the attention of an American software engineer. At that time, Billy Markus was just an ordinary coder at IBM's Oregon branch, but he was very interested in the emerging phenomenon of digital currencies. The emergence of Dogecoin caught his eye, so he contacted Palmer, expressing that he could help make Dogecoin a reality.

A "popular" currency developed in just 3 hours

In fact, before Dogecoin, Billy Markus had been trying to create his own digital currency. As a gaming enthusiast, he had created a digital currency called Bells based on Nintendo's Animal Crossing, but it did not gain any traction.

Just when he was feeling disheartened and ready to give up, the emergence of Dogecoin reignited his passion for coin creation. In fact, from the moment he started developing Dogecoin to its official launch, the entire process took only 3 hours.

"It was actually quite simple; it was basically a find-and-replace job. I copied a lot of Bitcoin's code and replaced 'Bitcoin' with 'Doge coin,'" Markus recalled in an interview with CNET about how easily he developed Dogecoin.

Image screenshot from Dogecoin's official website

Of course, Markus also mentioned that there were many parts of Bitcoin's open-source code that were difficult to understand, but there was already enough space for him to make "modifications."

One of the biggest modifications was the quantity and mining method of Dogecoin. Both Markus and Palmer believed that Bitcoin's set quantity limit and mining difficulty directly led to people's speculative mentality, and the various altcoins that followed were all monotonous and unoriginal. Therefore, they decided to make Dogecoin the "different firework."

Bitcoin has a limit of 21 million coins, while Markus set the total number of Dogecoins to over 12 billion, equivalent to infinite creation and supply. He also significantly lowered the mining difficulty, making it easy to mine without consuming water or electricity; if you wanted to mine, you could, and if you wanted to have it, you could. Today, nearly all of the billions of Dogecoins have been mined, while Bitcoin is expected to take over 100 more years to be fully mined.

Additionally, out of a desire to fully commit to the joke, they made some interesting changes. For example, they changed the font to a comic style similar to the meme, replaced "mine" with "dig," because dogs typically dig holes. Markus also modified the name of Bitcoin's creator Satoshi Nakamoto, changing his Twitter name to Shibetoshi Nakamoto.

They hoped Dogecoin would be "the people's currency," rather than serving speculators like Bitcoin. Once everything was ready, Dogecoin went live during lunchtime.

At that time, Markus and Palmer thought it would just be a fleeting joke that people would enjoy and then move on. But unexpectedly, the unintentional joke took off; after Dogecoin went live, it exploded on Reddit and Twitter. Within less than two weeks of its release, Dogecoin had its own blog and forum, with followers exceeding 1 million.

In the eyes of everyone, Dogecoin at that time was just a fun thing; no one treated it as a serious asset. People casually used it for tipping, gifting, and so on, often giving away thousands or tens of thousands at a time. They would also gather to use it to fund various quirky things or charitable causes.

However, as more and more people learned about Dogecoin, coupled with the endorsement of some celebrities over the years, the previously worthless Dogecoin began to change, transforming into a hot investment target.

Elon Musk's involvement further pushed the Dogecoin frenzy to a climax. Now, retail investors worldwide are striving towards the $1 target set by Musk, all doing their part to send Dogecoin on a SpaceX rocket into the universe. Ironically, however, the two founders of Dogecoin are not among them.

As of the time of writing, the price of one Dogecoin has once exceeded $0.68, and a trip to the moon may be just around the corner.