Jackson Palmer, a self-identified “average geek,” is high in the stands at a Nascar race at the Sonoma Raceway in California.
Palmer describes the situation using words like “crazy,” “surreal” and “nuts.” He remembers this moment as a “reality check.” Dogecoin was a tweet, then it was a cryptocurrency worth money in the real world.
Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency, a form of digital money that, much like bitcoin, enables peer-to-peer transactions across a decentralized network.
At the peak of the meme’s popularity near the tail end of 2013, Palmer, an Australian marketer for one of the world’s largest tech companies, made a joke combining two of the internet’s most talked-about topics: cryptocurrency and Doge.
On the other side of the world, Billy Markus, a video game-obsessed software engineer at IBM, saw Palmer’s note.
Bells was a cryptocurrency named after money used in the Nintendo game Animal Crossing.
Markus had a relatively powerful gaming PC, with two graphics cards, so he was officially the first person to mine Dogecoin.
But Reddit was almost certainly the main driver in Dogecoin’s rapid rise to crypto stardom.
For the first time in a decade, Jamaica’s bobsled team had qualified for the Winter Olympics, but it didn’t have enough money to attend.
“I don’t mind if someone spends ten bucks and gets some Dogecoin,” says Markus.
For him, Dogecoin was still crypto “for sillies,” but here it was ballooning into a currency people were trading for real money.
Alex Green began by doling out Dogecoin in exchange for upvotes on the Dogecoin subreddit.
Despite removing himself from the day-to-day workings of Dogecoin, Markus attended a Dogecoin convention, organized in part by Palmer.
Many key figures in the Dogecoin community shared Markus’ suspicions, particularly Palmer, who was wary of Moolah from the beginning.
A request for comment was sent to Kennedy’s Defence Lawyer, but we’ve yet to receive a response.
In May 2016, he was tried and convicted on three counts of rape with three separate women.
Back in January 2014, Markus posted a message on the Dogecoin subreddit; an ode to the community and what it had achieved.