Dogecoin co-creator Jackson Palmer said in a new interview with Australian publication Crikey that he wishes “it was the end of crypto, but it’s not,” and that “increasingly people are doing nothing but making money off doing nothing, it’s kind of fucked us all up.”
Palmer was promoting his new podcast Griftonomics, a name that also reflects his current criticisms of crypto.
“I honestly thought that [crypto] would implode a bit more quickly and people would learn their lesson,” said Palmer. “But increasingly, in the past six months, I’ve seen a continued perseverance. You see these big people with big money getting involved and that means it’s not slowing down.”
He also shot down the idea there might be a “crypto winter” around the corner saying: “I still see heaps of money being funneled in by crypto promoters. They’re waiting for a fresh batch of fools to come in. This happens in cycles.”
Palmer denounced ICOs, DAOs, and NFTs as scams and called Initial Game Offerings (IGOs) the industry’s latest swindle. Initial game offerings are similar to ICOs: investors pre-purchase a blockchain game’s NFTs or in-game currencies.
Despite the money flooding in, the Dogecoin creator still believes that cynicism towards crypto is growing.
He recounted how between 2013 and 2020 he had surrounded himself with “crypto skeptics,” but “one by one, they progressively drank the crypto Kool-Aid.”
However, he sees the enthusiasm ebbing now: “due to people losing money there’s been an awakening.”
“I think there’s going to need to be a crash. I think we’re well overdue for some sort of pop, and I don’t think it’s going to be a big boom. It’s going to be a lot more painful, and unfortunately, it will probably affect minorities and those [at the ] lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum when it happens.”
Palmer also had a few words for the Dogecoin shilling Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
“He’s a grifter, he sells a vision in hopes that he can one day deliver what he’s promising, but he doesn’t know that. He’s just really good at pretending he knows,” he said. “My opinion on him and all billionaires is that I don’t care much for them.”
Jackson Palmer and Dogecoin: A Primer
Dogecoin was created by software programmers Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus in 2013, who intended the project to be a tongue-in-cheek satire of the then-emergent craze of minting altcoins that have little value except novelty symbolism.
The cryptocurrency has since picked up a rabid fanbase, however, when Bitcoin began its latest bull run at the end of 2020. They’re known colloquially as the “Doge Army.”
The coin’s avatar is the iconic chubby Shiba Inu dog, whose face rose to prominence as a meme accompanied by adorable phrases in broken English, like “Much wow” and “Very impress.”
Dogecoin became a small but often profitable pop culture phenomenon through Twitter too.
Celebrities like rapper Snoop Dogg, rocker Gene Simmons, and multi-billionaire Elon Musk have all had a few things to say about the cryptocurrency on the platform, often pumping the price.
Last year, Jackson Palmer launched a scathing Twitter tirade against his former project, which he left in 2015. His incendiary criticism began in earnest from the second tweet in the thread:
“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.”