Canto I: The Origin of the Sacred Joke
Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer create Dogecoin as satire of the crypto bubble
In November 2013, the world of cryptocurrencies was in turmoil. Bitcoin had surpassed $1,000 for the first time. Dozens of new projects emerged weekly, each promising to be the next Bitcoin, the money of the future, the ultimate solution to humanity's financial problems. The bubble reeked of inevitability. And Jackson Palmer, a marketing manager at Adobe in Sydney, thought it was all hilarious.
Palmer posted an ironic proposal on Twitter: invest in Dogecoin, since it would surely be the next big thing. It was pure sarcasm, a combination of the Doge meme (Shiba Inu with Comic Sans text that had gone viral in 2013) with inflated crypto-hype language. He expected his friends to laugh. Instead, thousands of people responded asking where they could buy.
On the other side of the world, Billy Markus, a software engineer at IBM in Portland, Oregon, was trying to create an easy-to-use cryptocurrency that could reach a wider audience than Bitcoin. He read Palmer's tweet and had a simple idea: what if they created the coin Palmer had invented as a joke? Markus contacted Palmer through Reddit. They met over the internet. In two weeks, they built what they needed.
Dogecoin launched on 6 December 2013, derived from Luckycoin, itself descended from Litecoin. It thereby inherited Scrypt mining. Its mascot was a Shiba Inu and its tone playful, but its blocks, wallets and transfers were real. The joke had acquired its own means of circulation.
Dionysus's paradox materialized immediately: the more clearly Dogecoin signaled that it was a joke, the more genuinely people fell in love with it. Because in the joke was a truth that serious projects avoided saying, that money is, in the end, a collective fiction sustained by trust. And Dogecoin, by making this explicit through humor, touched something profoundly human.
I didn't expect anyone to take this seriously. That's exactly why everyone did.