By Mat Di Salvo
3 min read
Elon Musk isn’t backing down when it comes to Dogecoin.
The world’s richest man and soon-to-be U.S. government employee said on Twitter (aka X) that the joke cryptocurrency’s inflationary model is a “feature, not a bug.”
He was responding to Dogecoin co-founder Billy Markus’ tweet explaining to developers how to adjust the asset’s tokenomics.
Unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, Dogecoin—the sixth-biggest cryptocurrency with a market cap of $56 billion—has an infinite supply limit with 10,000 new coins minted every minute. That's about $3,850 worth. Because it's a fixed number of coins, the percentage it represents of the total supply gradually falls over time.
Markus was telling the Dogecoin community how to get other developers to vote on changing the coin’s tokenomics. It had clearly a point of contention, as Markus added: "You can change it right there, make a pull request [and] convince the community and miners to use the new version. Now stop fucking bothering me about it."
But Tesla CEO Musk replied in support of the feature as it currently exists, writing: “I think the flat inflation of Dogecoin, which means decreasing percentage inflation, is a feature, not a bug.”
Markus responded in agreement, saying that he believed Dogecoin’s model made it “ideal for something intended as a currency.”
Dogecoin inflation has been a hot topic in the past: Billionaire entrepreneur and crypto enthusiast Mark Cuban said back in 2021 that the original meme coin was useful as a payment method precisely because of its seemingly strange tokenomics.
“This is exactly why people will buy physical products with Dogecoin and not with Bitcoin and rarely with Ethereum,” he wrote on Twitter at the time.
“It’s hard for someone with $100 to get excited about owning a fraction of Bitcoin or Ethereum,” Cuban added. “It’s easy with Dogecoin. When it appreciates, that makes those items easy [to] buy.”
Cuban is the former owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and the basketball team started accepting Dogecoin for tickets and merchandise back in 2021 under his leadership.
Elon Musk has been a fan of Dogecoin since 2018, frequently pumping the cryptocurrency on the social media platform he now owns. The asset’s developers exclusively told Decrypt in 2019 that they were working with Musk to make it a viable cryptocurrency for payments.
It’s worth noting that Musk as recently as last month said that he wasn’t actively involved in the crypto sphere, but just “kind of” likes Dogecoin because “it has dogs and memes, and I love all those things.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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