‘Parasitic’: Why the founder of Dogecoin thinks cryptocurrencies are a hoax

But again, I quickly realized that there were channels that promoted things like “how to get 10x your investment” that got hundreds of thousands more views than mine, so I wondered why I was doing it? So in 2019, I deleted all my social networks and stayed away.

I bought a domain name for Griftonomics last year. And when I was about to start recording the first episode, I was glad, why? Why am I doing this again? So I left for another year, and part of me thought that some of these things might implode during that time, but it didn’t happen. If anything, there are more scams than a year ago. So in recent weeks, I’ve decided it’s time to get back to it.

Where do you think cryptocurrencies fall in the large grift scheme?

When I started Griftonomics, I wanted the series to be mainly about things unrelated to cryptocurrencies, such as rush culture, online gambling, carbon credits, and the like. But the interesting thing about the crypto is that when you start scratching the surface of the things I just mentioned, you’ll find a crypto angle in every topic.

There is some way that this parasitic thing has its claws in every single kind of deception that is out there. It’s a facilitating technology. Crypto acts as an activator of many groups of scams by providing fraudsters with an unregulated and less controllable system to keep their scams going. Wherever there is smoke, there are probably cryptocurrencies.

So if it’s such a scam, why are so many people attracted to it?

Attached to the cryptocurrencies is this story, which exploits the fears or situations in which the average person finds himself, and the fraudsters have used it to sell people the idea of ​​a cryptocurrency that it is some cutting-edge new technology. And that puts people in this situation where they say, “Oh, there’s such a crazy way I can make a lot of money, and it’s some crazy technology that celebrities and billionaires think it’s good, so it has to be great. “. And that’s closer.

‘When Matt Damon gets up at the Superbowl and tells you that monkeys will be the future, some people will think,’ Well, maybe I was wrong. ‘

Doggecoin founder Jackson Palmer on cryptocurrencies

A new story appears every two or three years. In 2009, it was that bitcoin would replace all those banks that just screwed you over. A few years later, when it didn’t work out, it was said that he was just a store of value. He then turned to the ICO again [Initial Coin Offerings]democratization of fundraising and we recently went through DeFi [Decentralised Finance] a narrative that was a complete deception.

We now have an NFT [Non-Fungible Tokens]which are simply the latest in a long line of changing stories so the industry can gain a lot of new ghosts.

First, I’m totally shocked that some expensive images of apes can actually be a scam.

[laughs]. That’s the thing – I think a lot of people suspend their mistrust when it comes to things like that.

If you went back five years and people told you that monkey JPEGs sold for a million dollars, people would laugh at you. The problem, however, is that it has been legitimized by its promoters, who put money in the pockets of celebrities or politicians to legitimize it.

When Matt Damon gets up at the Superbowl and tells you that monkeys will be the future, some people will think, “Well, maybe I was wrong.”

How much do you think such a factor of Elon Musk plays in this? When the richest man in the world talks about cryptocurrencies on Twitter, does it further legitimize this space?

Elon has had a big impact, especially on the dogecoin market, and has made people believe that this is something I obviously disagree with. But it’s not just Elon, I think it’s also various big names like Marc Andreessen, Mark Cuban and a few other big names in investment that are heavily on cryptocurrency and probably have as much, if not more influence than Elon Musk. .

If you look at the people who were involved in Y Combinator or 500 Startups 10 years ago, I pretty much guarantee that everyone runs a crypto-risk fund right now. And some of them pump millions, if not billions of dollars, into attempts to legitimize these things.

From your point of view, is any part of the Web3 space legitimate? Could any of this stay and be really useful?

Not really. I think it’s a nail-seeking hammer and it doesn’t bring any meaningful value back to society.

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I’m a big supporter of decentralization, I had a man in the podcast who was the creator of Mastodon, a decentralized social network very similar to Twitter. Does he need a blockchain? Does it need a cryptocurrency to function? Definitely not. And the same can be said for so many peer-to-peer protocols.

What the cryptocurrency does is play on incentives to gain adoption by making the product something people can speculate about, and this greatly undermines its ability to handle many of these uses.

I think it’s very telling that the people who seem to be most involved in the cryptocurrency, pour the most money into the cryptocurrencies, and have the most power over them are the same people who destroyed the economy in 2008, the same people who are billionaires in the real world. . .

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