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Billy Markus

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Billy Markus
Billy Markus
Image: X profile avatar of @BillyM2k
handle@BillyM2k
rolesoftware engineer, Dogecoin cocreator
known forDogecoin, posting as Shibetoshi Nakamoto, selling everything in 2015

Billy Markus is the American software engineer who cocreated Dogecoin in 2013, sold out for the price of a used car in 2015, and returned as the beloved CT commentator Shibetoshi Nakamoto.

Contents
  1. 1 Creating and leaving Dogecoin
  2. 2 Shibetoshi Nakamoto
  3. 3 Position in the culture
  4. 4 References

Billy Markus is an American software engineer from Portland, Oregon, who worked at IBM before crypto. In December 2013 he cocreated Dogecoin with Jackson Palmer, assembling the coin in a matter of hours as a joke that fused the doge meme of Kabosu with the era's altcoin boom, and in doing so accidentally authored the founding document of meme coin history.

Creating and leaving Dogecoin

Markus wrote the code side of Dogecoin while Palmer supplied the meme and the domain, and the coin found an instant tipping community on Reddit. Markus left the project in 2015 amid burnout and community drama, and famously sold his entire DOGE stack for roughly the price of a used Honda Civic, a detail he has repeated often and which became a canonical trench parable about selling early. He therefore captured almost none of the tens of billions of dollars of value Dogecoin later reached.

Shibetoshi Nakamoto

During the 2021 mania Markus reemerged on Twitter as Shibetoshi Nakamoto, a name riffing on Bitcoin's pseudonymous founder, and became one of the most followed original voices in crypto commentary. Profiles by DailyCoin and 99Bitcoins describe his register: sarcastic, self deprecating, openly skeptical of the market that made his joke worth billions. He has repeatedly said he holds relatively little DOGE, that most crypto trading is gambling, and that people who ape into random coins should expect to lose money. He sold NFTs of his original artwork in 2021, engages in regular public banter with Elon Musk about Dogecoin, and comments on every major market crash, which outlets like U.Today cover as if delivering statements from a head of state.

Position in the culture

Markus occupies a unique seat in the trenches: the founder who kept the humor and skipped the bag. He mocks both the maximalists and the doomers, defends Dogecoin as harmless fun while calling most successor coins cash grabs, and his 2015 exit price is cited constantly as the ultimate cautionary tale about conviction. Unlike his cofounder Jackson Palmer, he remained inside the culture, and his account is treated as one of the last honest broadcasts from the origin of the meme coin era.

References

Category: People