The Dogecoin (CRYPTO: DOGE) is down 5.6% over the past 24 hours, currently trading for 7.85 US cents.
That puts the popular meme coin, with a Shiba Inu as its mascot, down 55% so far in 2022. And it's now down 89% since hitting all-time highs of 73.8 US cents precisely 13 months ago, on 8 May 2021.
Despite that retrace, and because the rest of the crypto market has been tumbling this year as well, Dogecoin remains the number 10 crypto in terms of market cap, with a total valuation just shy of US$11 billion.
Not bad for a token that initially was created in 2013 as a joke by Billy Markus from Portland, Oregon, and Jackson Palmer from Sydney, Australia.
Yet despite Dogecoin now being a household name, at least among the crypto-savvy, co-founder Palmer is one of its staunchest critics.
Image source: Getty Images
'Wherever there's smoke there's probably crypto'
Palmer turned his back on the crypto world in 2016, when he became highly skeptical of the wider industry.
Now he's launching a podcast called Griftonomics, which focuses on modern scams investors should be wary of. And cryptos, including Dogecoin, top the list.
According to Palmer (courtesy of The Sydney Morning Herald):
When I set out to do Griftonomics, I wanted the series to be mostly about things that weren't crypto-related, like hustle culture, online gambling, carbon credits, things like that. But the interesting thing about crypto is, as you start to scratch the surface of the things I just mentioned, in every topic, you find a crypto angle.
There is some way that this parasitic thing has got its claws in every single kind of scam that is out there. It's a facilitating technology. Crypto acts as an enabler of many groups of scams by providing an unregulated, harder to control system for scammers to perpetuate their scams.
Wherever there's smoke there's probably crypto.
Big names pump up Dogecoin and other cryptos
Palmer says that industry "grifters" use the idea that cryptos like Dogecoin and Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) offer "some sort of cutting-edge new technology" along with much-hyped endorsements from billionaires and celebrities to lure in new investors.
"Elon [Musk] has had a big impact, especially on the Dogecoin market and making people believe that it is something, which I obviously don't agree with," he said.
And they're always ready to spin a new angle.
According to Palmer (quoted by the SMH):
Every two or three years there's a new narrative. In 2009, it was that Bitcoin was going to replace all these banks that just screwed you over. Then a few years later when that didn't work out, the narrative was that it was just a store of value. Then it pivoted again to ICOs [initial coin offerings], democratising fundraising, and then recently we went through the DeFi [decentralised finance] narrative, which was just a total sham.
Now we have NFTs [non-fungible tokens], which are simply the latest in a long string of changing narratives, so the industry can get a bunch of new suckers in.
Even when it comes to Web 3.0 – which envisions remaking the global internet based on blockchain technology – Palmer is dismissive.
"I'm a huge proponent of decentralisation, I had a person on the podcast who was the creator of Mastodon, a decentralised social network a lot like Twitter," he said. "Does it need a blockchain? Does it need cryptocurrency to function? Absolutely not."
