DOGE Creator Pours Criticism on US Taxation System: Details

Billy Markus, known on the X social media app as Shibetoshi Nakamoto, who created the original meme coin DOGE together with Jackson Palmer in 2013, is a frequent X app user who shares his takes not only on things related to DOGE and crypto in general.

This time, Markus commented on the U.S. taxation system. This is his second recent comment on it, the first one was to do with crypto.

DOGE founder slams U.S. taxation system

Markus commented on an X post by the @unusual_whales account, which cited Fed Reserve data about 55.8 million Americans, who are older than 65 now and constitute 17% of the country’s population, owning “half of America’s wealth,” which the government can gradually extract by means of taxation.

To that, the DOGE founder responded with critique, stating that “The government is salivating over getting to re-tax the already taxed money when they die.”

On Oct. 9, Markus stated that if the U.S. government believes crypto not to have innate or inherent value, then they should not take taxes on crypto sales. “Then return all the taxes y’all made me pay for receiving it you horrific evil hypocrites,” Billy Markus tweeted.

Markus says crypto’s “realness is transitory”

Elon Musk, the boss of the X app, supported him then, tweeting: “It’s real if you have to pay taxes, but otherwise not real?” Markus’ response was maybe what the crypto community did not expect to see. He wrote, “Its realness is transitory.” It remains questionable whether Billy Markus believes all crypto to be real assets.

He recently admitted that he likes Bitcoin and Ethereum but does not like ERC20 tokens based on the latter. Still, he has many times earlier stated that he believes crypto prices go up and down randomly and compared investing in crypto and NFTs to mental illnesses. This sounds even stranger since Markus himself makes and sells non-fungible tokens.

In early January, Markus also revealed that he had to sell some of his Ethereum to pay taxes for selling NFTs in 2022. Back then, the ETH price was $1,190, and right after he sold his “bunch of ETH,” the price of the second largest crypto jumped by roughly 20%, reaching $1,220.

Billy Markus supports Musk’s coming X app update

As covered by U.Today on Friday, Elon Musk announced that soon there will be two tiers of Premium subscription launched on the X app. One will be a cheaper one but will make users watch adverts. The second one will be more expensive, however adverts will be removed from there.

The crypto community eagerly responded to that, some even offering to pay in crypto — XRP. However, a great deal of X app users seem to be unhappy about it. Billy Markus has addressed this issue in his X post today, stating that “If people enjoy using a product, they should be down with either paying for it or seeing ads.”

He explained the obvious thing — businesses need to earn money in order to survive, pay salaries to their staff and so on. Markus said that this should be obvious but some people apparently need a reality check here.

About the author

Yuri Molchan