Dogecoin co-founder Billy Markus, who created the original meme cryptocurrency together with Jackson Palmer back in 2013, took to Twitter to "reveal" the actual connection of his brainchild DOGE to the flagship crypto Bitcoin.
"Dogecoin is Cousin Greg"
Markus shared a photo of a cover of John Stevenson's book called "Dogecoin — Bitcoin's Poor Cousin?" Billy wrote in his tweet that, in fact, "Bitcoin is Cousin Greg." That's whom the second screenshot shared by this crypto influencer refers to — Greg Hirsch from the HBO series Succession that started in 2018 and continues to run still.
dogecoin is cousin greg pic.twitter.com/g2e5vgi6V8
— Shibetoshi Nakamoto (@BillyM2k) April 15, 2023
In the series, Greg Hirsch is referred to as "Cousin Greg." Greg Hirsch is a lackadaisical great-nephew of one of the main characters, a member of the family. This is what the succession.fandom website says about Greg: "Far removed from The Roy Family's wealth, he moves to New York to ingratiate himself with Logan Roy and get a stable job within the company."
This analogy with Dogecoin seems to have caught the attention of Billy Markus as he, perhaps somewhat ironically, reacted to the title of the book about DOGE by Stevenson.
Indeed, however, Dogecoin was a spring-off of Bitcoin, made on the basis of the BTC code and as a parody on Bitcoin. It uses the same consensus protocol as BTC, proof of work, and is even mined together with Litecoin, another BTC spring-off. Still, now Dogecoin is on the top 10 list of cryptos, according to CoinMarketCap, holding the honorable eighth spot. Its market capitalization stands at $12,376,257,931 as it is trading at $0.08907.
Dogecoin, Elon Musk and Billy Markus
The meme coin was lucky to attract the interest of Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, founder of SpaceX and the owner of Twitter, a person who is among the three richest men on earth, often becoming the wealthiest one among them. Recently, Musk put DOGE on the logo of Twitter for a few days, which propelled the coin's 33% rise within hours. Musk has recently mentioned on Twitter that he considers Billy Markus to be his friend, although they have never met in person and only communicate via Twitter. Musk allegedly holds large amounts of Dogecoin.
Markus and Palmer created DOGE as a side project, a hobby. According to a recent comment by Markus in response to Anthony Pompliano's tweet, he created Dogecoin within just a few hours.
Several times recently, Billy Markus reminded his followers on Twitter that he left the Dogecoin project nearly after it was launched and sold the majority of his DOGE. He does not plan to create a new cryptocurrency project or get involved in such a project in any role, since he believes crypto investing to be a form of gambling.
Vladislav Sopov
Tomiwabold Olajide
Alex Dovbnya