Dogecoin creator likens cryptocurrencies to a scam run by "powerful cartel" to benefit the rich

Dogecoin co-founder Jackson Palmer created the digital currency in 2013 as a meme-inspired joke. Five years later, its market value had soared into the billions, leading him to write at the time that cryptocurrencies had attracted "shark-like scammers and opportunists."

But the laugh now appears to be on millions of ordinary investors, the Australian entrepreneur suggested this week in a series of blistering tweets denouncing bitcoin, ethereum and other cryptocurrencies as a something resembling a mass Ponzi scheme to "extract new money from the financially desperate and naive." "After years of studying it, I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology built primarily to amplify the wealth of its proponents through a combination of tax avoidance, diminished regulatory oversight and artificially enforced scarcity," Palmer wrote.