A #software engineer built a joke coin in a weekend and walked away with enough to buy a used Honda Civic. That coin later hit $88 billion.
> In 2013 Billy Markus was a software engineer at IBM who thought crypto was taking itself too seriously.
> He gave himself a weekend to build a joke. A parody. Something ridiculous.
> Jackson Palmer had already bought the domain dogecoin.com as a punchline to a tweet.
> No coin. No code. Just a website with a Shiba Inu on it.
> It said: if you want to make this real, contact me.
> Markus contacted him and started writing the code before Palmer even replied.
> He said "I threw it together in a few hours with parameters I thought were generally ridiculous. 100 billion coins, for example."
> The most time consuming part was getting the Comic Sans font right.
> Within two weeks it had a market cap of $8 million.
> Within a month over a million people had visited the website.
> The community raised $30,000 in Dogecoin in under two days to send the Jamaican bobsled team to the Winter Olympics.
> A joke coin funding an underdog team nobody believed in.
> Then in 2015 Billy lost his job. Got harassed online. Received death threats over a joke coin. So he sold everything.
> All his $DOGE
, all his Bitcoin, all his crypto. Enough to buy a used Honda Civic.
> He used it to pay rent instead then he walked away.
> Then Elon Musk tweeted "Dogecoin is the people's crypto."
> Price pumped 50% in a single day.
> DOGE hit an $88 billion market cap. Bigger than Ford. Bigger than the entire Honda Motor Company.
> The man who built it in a weekend watched all of this happen from his couch.
> His only regret: "The only thing I personally would've changed is to not sell in 2015."
A man spent a few hours building a joke and accidentally created one of the most valuable financial assets in history. Then sold his share of it to pay rent.