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Billy Markus, who created the legendary meme cryptocurrency Dogecoin together with Jackson Palmer and launched it in 2013, has revealed the details of how DOGE was created 10 years ago. But, more importantly, he exposed a big secret about Dogecoin that has allowed it to exist until now and will allow it to exist longer on the market.
Some believe that this “bug” gives Dogecoin a major advantage over Bitcoin as an actual replacement for cash.
Here’s how Markus and Palmer created Dogecoin
On Dec. 6, the 10th “birthday” of Dogecoin was celebrated, and Markus published an X post, sharing some details about how he created the very first meme cryptocurrency in the world.
Markus did not share all of the details, but from his tweet published on Dec. 6, 2013, 10 years ago, it is clear that it was Jackson Palmer who suggested the idea of creating Dogecoin, and Markus responded to his call as he found it interesting.
10 years ago i saw a funny tweet about the idea of dogecoin and i decided to make it in a few hours, then a bunch of weird things happened and now the currency is worth 14 billion dollars for some reason https://t.co/2qEcAf5y8h
— Shibetoshi Nakamoto (@BillyM2k) December 6, 2023
Markus responded, offered his services as a crypto developer and sent Palmer a link to the bitcointalk forum; that page contained the details of a coin that he had already made a code for – “Bells.”
Ultimately, Billy Markus created DOGE in just two hours, sitting at home, and then “a bunch of weird things happened and now the currency is worth 14 billion dollars for some reason.”
Bug left in Dogecoin
X account @reddit_lies, with slightly more than 300,000 followers, pointed out to Markus that Dogecoin contains a curious feature – “Dogecoin doesn't have an artificial limit on the number of coins that can be mined.” The user pointed out that it makes DOGE better than its predecessor, Bitcoin, with a fixed supply of 21 million in the sense that Dogecoin can actually replace regular fiat cash.
Markus explained that he was aware of this feature and said that it was a “bug” that he and Palmer left there on purpose. They did not expect Dogecoin to be around for more than a year since they did not believe that people would be interested in this parody of Bitcoin and its code any longer than that.
yeah, that was a bug 🤣 but we left it in
— Shibetoshi Nakamoto (@BillyM2k) December 6, 2023
it was designed to die in about a year cuz i thought that was the max amount of time people would be amused by the joke, but a bug gave it a long tail
if that bug was fixed, doge woulda died many years ago
However, Markus admitted that the bug “gave it a long tail.” If they had fixed that issue, Markus said, “doge woulda died many years ago.”