I put a dog on a coin and the rest is history - hey Steemit!

Hey there, my name is Jackson Palmer, and amongst other things I’m known as the guy who put a dog on a coin and kickstarted the wild ride that was (is?) Dogecoin. Here’s a picture of me speaking at the first Dogecoin conference, “Dogecon” back in 2014:

It seems forever ago that I first posted the tweet that would lead to Dogecoin becoming a reality, and I'm still amazed every day that the currency continues to maintain a $25-30M market cap... I guess it's kind of stable in that regard actually? We achieved a lot of great things with Dogecoin, from sponsoring a Jamaican bobsled team so they could attend the Winter Olympics, to raising money for guide dogs and to drill wells in Kenya, and the sponsorship of a NASCAR which I was lucky enough to see on the track in person.

All of that wouldn't have been possible without the amazing community that grew around Dogecoin, and part of me likes to think that in a way Dogecoin influenced cryptocurrency as a whole and made everyone take themselves just a little less seriously. It also brought a wider demographic of new people into cryptocurrency and started to educate them about its use, which I think is pretty cool.

You can learn more about the history of Dogecoin in this interview I did with Kevin Rose for Foundation:

...as a community we also had our fair share of drama, but that's a story for another day :)

Steemit is an interesting concept to me as it also embraces the community building approach and some of the content here already looks really interesting! One of Dogecoin's primary use cases was also tipping, which you folks seem to have nicely implemented here. My advice: Use the strength of your community for good, always keep things fun and never let greed become your primary motivator (it can be hard in the world of crypto, I know)

As for what I'm working on right now, some topics/ideas/side projects that have been on the top of my mind lately are:

• Bringing regulation to the table in a way that makes sense.. it's clear we need some sort of change to avoid a new Bitfinex happening each week
• Better utilizing WebRTC as a P2P channel for cryptocurrencies
• Smart contract interoperability across different blockchains (imagine a blockchain per country or per legal jurisdiction)

Thanks for having me here, feel free to drop any questions / suggestions for future posts in the comments!