
Australian software developer Jackson Palmer is a co-creator of Dogecoin. It’s a meme-inspired cryptocurrency that launched as a joke in 2013 but has become one of the world’s most valuable, after being promoted by the likes of Elon Musk and the traders at r/wallstreetbets. Palmer left the crypto community in 2015 and denounced the technology. Palmer gave a rare interview to coincide with the launch of his new podcast Griftonomics.
CRIKEY: You haven’t given many interviews and don’t even tweet much — although when you do, it often makes a splash. This week, you launched a new podcast, Griftonomics. Why now?
JACKSON PALMER: I actually purchased the Griftonomics domain a year ago. I was going to do this before [the July 2021 tweet storm where he denounced cryptocurrency as an “inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology”]. I saw what was happening a year ago. It wasn’t just crypto, it was like gambling on Twitch, rumblings of the metaverse. I realised it didn’t really matter if you were producing any value any more, the whole world has become this snake oil scheme.
So I bought griftonomics.com and the first episode was going to be about crypto. I’d written the introduction and that’s what became that tweet thread. I was reflecting on it a lot, thinking “do I pull the trigger or not?”. I had been off Twitter for a couple of years because I’ve gotten burned out on crypto and was enjoying a quieter life. Instead of the podcast, I posted the Twitter thread and walked away.
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All was well for a year. I honestly thought that things — and I think they’re starting to now — would implode a bit more quickly and people would learn their lesson. But increasingly, in the past six months, I’ve seen a continued perseverance. You see these big people with big money getting involved and that means it’s not slowing down.
So I bit the bullet. I think I’m kind of ready in life to subject myself to nonsense. We’ll see. It’s perfect timing — the year is heating up, there’s a lot of grifting going on, there’s the Elon Musk Twitter takeover.
C: I want to get to the Elon Musk takeover, but first, can we talk about the cryptocurrency “winter” (as venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is calling it). Do you have any thoughts on it?
JP: I wouldn’t say that it’s in a winter. I still see heaps of money being funnelled in by crypto promoters. They’re waiting for a fresh batch of fools to come in. This happens in cycles. You wait for a while for the collective memory of the world to forget about how much of a scam it is. We’ve had ICOs [initial coin offerings], DAOs [decentralised autonomous organisations], now it’s NFT [non-fungible tokens]. Now I’m seeing initial game offerings as the latest thing.
Sadly I wish it was the end of crypto, but it’s not. More holistically, in this system of griftonomics, hypercapitalism, rentier capitalism, increasingly people are doing nothing but making money off doing nothing, it’s kind of fucked us all up. It’s given people this weird mental issue that things that 5 to 10 years ago people would have the common sense to say “that’s weird”, are OK. Now, even if it’s fraudulent, they think “do I really care?”
The bigger problem is because it’s so easy to grift now through crypto. Look at Drake’s Instagram now. It belongs to [cryptocurrency betting company] Stake. I think people think that if they make money, it’s OK. Hustle, hustle, make money. The worst part, and no offence to journalists, is that there’s a ton of journalists who’ve gotten on that gravy train. Ethics? Don’t need that any more.
C: One thing I’ve noticed is that there’s a real incentive for journalists to cover cryptocurrency. Any story that involves cryptocurrency will get a heap of traffic.
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