Much dogecoin. So controversy. Wow.
Or, in non-Internet English, the founder of dogecoin ruffled some feathers last week with his comments about virtual currencies.
Speaking in Sydney, Jackson Palmer — founder of dogecoin, a digital currency based on an Internet meme — claimed that he turned down more than $500,000 from two venture capital firms, according to a report from Australian tech blog Techly. One dogecoin is currently worth around $0.0014.
His reasons? He wanted to maintain the spirit of dogecoin, which, apparently, is nothing like that of bitcoin.
“You can go to a bitcoin meetup and meet people who are like ‘I have 100 bitcoins, I’m a multimillionaire,'" he said at a dogecoin meetup organized by Reddit. (Although bitcoin owners might find themselves less boastful after the second-biggest bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, temporarily banned withdrawals earlier this month and the value of bitcoin plummeted).
Instead, dogecoin is keeping it real. Palmer's answer, according to Techly, on what he would tell investors who ask him why he doesn’t want to get rich off of his creation: "And I reply, 'You know what I’m going to tell my grandkids? I’m going to tell them that we paired service dogs with children in need, off the back of a (expletive) joke.'"
He was referring to the “Doge4Kids” campaign, which raised more than the equivalent of $30,000 to provide service dogs to children with disabilities. Palmer also advocated for at least some government regulation for cryptocurrencies like dogecoin and bitcoin, and noted that, unlike bitcoin, 5 million dogecoins will be added once the global supply hits its initial limit of $100 billion.
That probably won't please libertarians, who have praised cryptocurrencies like bitcoin for their lack of government oversight and the fact that, like gold, their total supply is fixed. Palmer, however, said he preferred more flexibility with “a deflationary/inflationary model I like to jokingly call 'dogeflation.'"