Dogecoin should be ‘funny’, says its founder – and Elon Musk seems to agree

Dogecoin lost more than a third of its value between 15-22 June, 2021 (Getty Images)

Dogecoin should remain “funny” and “absurd”, according to one of its co-founders.

Billy Markus helped create dogecoin in 2013 alongside fellow software engineer Jackson Palmer, when it was intended largely as a joke about the large number of cryptocurrencies that were being created. He has since sold off his original holding and stepped away from its development – though he announced this week that he had bought the cryptocurrency for the first time in eight years.

Mr Markus said that he thought that dogecoin should continue in the same spirit of fun that it was created with, and that people should avoid being too “serious or militant about it”.

The sentiment was seemingly reflected by Elon Musk, who has himself helped promote the cryptocurrency, when he replied with a tweet of two beers.

“IMO, $DOGE is at its best when it’s funny,” Mr Markus wrote in the tweet. “Wanting the future world / universe economy to ironically be satirical meme money is a fun story that people can get behind.

“When people get too serious or militant about it, for me, that ruins its charm.

“Keep $DOGE fun and absurd.”

In a follow-up tweet, he noted that it had been his position since 2014, when he published a Reddit post under the headline “Keep Dogecoin Absurd”.

In that post, he said that the phrase should become a rallying cry, likening it to the slogan “Keep Portland Weird” used in his hometown. He also pointed to the projects that had been launched as the cryptocurrency became popular, such as its use for charity and support of the Jamaican bobsled team and the funding of a doge-themed Nascar team.

“This is the real strength of the coin. If we get caught up in all the drama and greed and expectations of instant rewards and mud slinging and scapegoating and all the rest of that gunk, thenwe’ve just become the exact thing we were originally parodying,” he wrote in 2014.

“And that’s sad. Really sad.”

Later, Mr Markus appeared to confirm the sentiment by tweeting an image of a dog at a playground.

Dogecoin has fallen almost 11 per cent over the last week. But on Friday it was the only cryptocurrency not to sustain further losses: as bitcoin was down almost 4 per cent, and the entire market down more than 5 per cent, it had gained more than 6 per cent over the day.