Billy Markus is a software engineer who co-founded Dogecoin and is also known by his Twitter username, ‘Shibetoshi Nakamoto’, a wordplay with the pseudonym of the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. ^[1]

Career

Before working on Dogecoin, Billy was one of the leading software engineers at IBM (International Business Machines) Corporations, a multinational computing company that creates and sells software, hardware, clouds, and data. ^[2]

Dogecoin

In late 2013, co-founder Jackson Palmer thought it would be funny to make a website of a meme and bought the domain name, dogecoin.com. Billy came across this website and thought he could take the joke further by creating a ‘meme’ coin in a way to make fun of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as a whole. ^[3][11]

“I ran across the website randomly and thought it would be funny to make the actual Dogecoin. I threw it together in a few hours, and we launched it, and then it took off, and lots of crazy stuff happened since.”

Billy reached out to Jackson and the two created Dogecoin: a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that integrates Litecoin’s proof-of-work blockchain technology. ^[3]

Dogecoin officially launched on December 6th, 2013, and dramatically gained popularity in January 2021 when the CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk began tweeting about the coin. Before the gain in popularity, co-founder Jackson Palmer sold all his Dogecoin holdings as a way to step away from the crypto project as a whole. ^[3][4][5]

“As I mentioned on my twitter, I'm no longer part of the Dogecoin project, I left around 2015 as the community started to strongly shift from one that I was comfortable with.”

Personal Life

Billy Markus was born in 1983, in Portland, Oregon, United States. ^[10]

When he sold his investment in Dogecoin in 2015, he stated that he had liquidated just enough money to purchase a second-hand Honda Civic. ^[6]

He works from home and creates educational software for children as his main job and in his free time in between, he uses Twitter to reconnect to the crypto community. Billy strongly believes that the crypto space is in a bad state and has publicly voiced his opinion on this matter. After the crash of LUNA, he tweeted,

“The reason why people think crypto is 95% scams and garbage and most crypto people are a******* is because crypto is 95% scams and garbage and most crypto people are a*******”.

This and other tweets of his along with the fact that he states that he received “harassment from the cryptocurrency community” was the reason he sold all his Dogecoin and stepped away from the project. ^[7][8]

Billy Markus left the community due to heavy criticism and his belief that the project and cryptocurrencies were nothing but a joke. When questioned about Dogecoin's future, he responded by saying that it would still just be a dog on a coin after five years. Markus also faced constant abuse and even death threats from members of the community, which ultimately led to his decision to leave Dogecoin behind. ^[11][12]

“It felt like there was so much attacking and negativity towards me"

After leaving Dogecoin, he remained active on Twitter. When someone asked why he wasn't interested in working for Elon Musk, he replied, "I like my current job." He also mentioned that he had only interacted with Elon Musk online and had no idea what working with him in person would be like, which is another reason he wasn't interested in the job. ^[13]

"he seems to tolerate me on the internet, I have never met him in person"

Billy has also played a lot of MMORPGs, especially World of Warcraft, and feels as though cryptocurrencies and NFTs will be moving in the direction of games in the future. ^[9]