Elon Musk, the Tesla chief executive who's sent the bitcoin price on a roller coaster this year, has continued his potentially ironic support of the "joke" bitcoin rival dogecoin.
Musk took to his preferred platform, Twitter, to explain why he's backing dogecoin, telling another Twitter user dogecoin "has dogs and memes"—helping the dogecoin price rebound from a steep sell-off over the weekend.
"Curious what are your thoughts on ethereum 2.0, cardano, solana, polkadot, IOTA and others that are trying to scale with low fees," asked Dave Lee, a YouTuber and Tesla investor. "What makes you choose doge over them?"
"[Dogecoin] has dogs and memes, whereas the others do not," Musk replied. The cryptocurrency market has been flooded by digital tokens looking to improve on bitcoin over the last few years, with rivals to ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency after bitcoin, being challenged by a slew of alternatives that promise lower fees, faster transaction times and improved efficiency.
Earlier, Musk issued a call to developers to submit ideas for dogecoin upgrades and improvements via Reddit and GitHub, also replying to a news story about ethereum upgrades, saying ethereum's co-founder Vitalik Buterin "fears the [doge]."
"Someone suggested changing dogecoin fees based on phases of the moon, which is pretty awesome," Musk added, telling one other Twitter user dogecoin developers "told [him] they would appreciate help."
Dogecoin, despite attracting criticism for its lack of development and high token concentration among a small group of accounts, has soared a staggering 12,000% on this time last year as people bet the price will continue to climb and social media influencers and billionaires cheer on the Shiba Inu dog-based memecoin—fuelling speculation the dogecoin price could climb as high as $1 per dogecoin token.
Musk, who enthusiastically embraced the honorary title of dogecoin CEO following a 2019 Twitter poll, has repeatedly named the meme-based cryptocurrency as his preferred digital token over recent years.
However, speaking during an interview in February, Musk said all his dogecoin-related comments shouldn't be taken seriously—something that continues to cast doubt over how much attention should be paid to Musk's frequent, market-moving dogecoin posts.
As well as boosting the dogecoin price with his tongue-in-cheek comments, Musk sent the bitcoin price higher after announcing he'd met with North American bitcoin miners.
The so-called miners, who secure the bitcoin network by directing computing power towards it in return for newly created bitcoin tokens, were brought together over the weekend by bitcoin investor Michael Saylor to discuss how to reduce bitcoin's eye-watering carbon footprint—something that caused Musk to suspend Tesla's use of bitcoin for payments earlier this month.
"Spoke with North American Bitcoin miners. They committed to publish current & planned renewable usage & to ask miners [world-wide] to do so," Musk posted to Twitter, adding he felt the meeting was: "Potentially promising."
"Yesterday I was pleased to host a meeting between [Musk] and the leading bitcoin miners in North America," Saylor said via Twitter. "The miners have agreed to form the Bitcoin Mining Council to promote energy usage transparency and accelerate sustainability initiatives worldwide."
The news that North America bitcoin miners had formed the Bitcoin Mining Council was met with raised eyebrows by many in the bitcoin and cryptocurrency community who fear it will lead to centralization of the bitcoin network.
"It's extremely concerning that this group of bitcoiners wandered into this 'meeting' without any sense of self-awareness," Marty Bent, co-founder of bitcoin miner Great American Mining and host of the Tales from the Crypt podcast, wrote in his email newsletter.
"Do they not recall the last time there was a closed door meeting that involved industry stakeholders who attempted to speak on behalf of an entire industry? How did they think this would turn out? The hubris is astounding."
This article originally appeared on Forbes.
