Markus, who uses the name Shibetoshi Nakamoto on X, made the remark on September 12 while responding to President Donald Trump’s promise of a $5,000 payment to every adult US citizen if Republicans retain control of both chambers of Congress in November’s midterm elections.
“Instead the government should buy 1.2 trillion dollars of dogecoin and give some to every american,” Markus wrote, adding a laughing emoji. Nothing in his post indicated that he was presenting an actionable government programme, and there is no evidence that the White House, Treasury or Congress is considering such a Dogecoin purchase.
The $1.2 trillion figure mirrors an estimate of the cost of Trump’s proposed payments. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget calculated that issuing $5,000 to every adult citizen in 2027 would cost more than $1.2 trillion in a single year, before accounting for additional interest costs.
Trump unveiled the proposed “dividend” at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas on September 9, making it conditional on his party maintaining its House and Senate majorities. Details of eligibility, financing and implementation remain unsettled, and federal spending on that scale would require congressional action.
The budget group said the payment could lift next year’s projected primary deficit from about $780 billion to roughly $2 trillion and push the total deficit to approximately $3.1 trillion. It also warned that injecting large amounts of cash into an economy operating near capacity could add to inflation and put upward pressure on interest rates.
Markus’s joke is striking partly because $1.2 trillion dwarfs Dogecoin’s existing market value. CoinGecko data showed the cryptocurrency’s market capitalisation at about $13.1 billion on September 12, with DOGE trading around eight cents. A purchase notionally equal to $1.2 trillion would therefore be more than 90 times that market capitalisation at prevailing prices.
DOGE had also been volatile before Markus’s post. CoinGecko figures put its market value above $14.1 billion on September 7 before it slipped below $13.2 billion by September 12. That movement underscores the scale mismatch embedded in the joke: even without allowing for market impact, the proposed government outlay would exceed the token’s quoted valuation many times over, while any distribution would expose recipients to normal cryptocurrency price fluctuations.
That comparison does not mean the government could acquire $1.2 trillion of DOGE at the quoted market price. Cryptocurrency market capitalisation is calculated by multiplying the latest traded price by circulating supply; it is not a pool of available liquidity. Attempting purchases on anything approaching that scale would encounter limited sell-side supply and could move the price sharply, making the eventual acquisition cost impossible to infer from current quotations.
Dogecoin had roughly 171.6 billion coins in circulation around September 12. Unlike Bitcoin, it has no fixed maximum supply. Its protocol awards 10,000 DOGE for each mined block, with a target block interval of about one minute, adding roughly five billion coins a year.
Markus created Dogecoin with Jackson Palmer in 2013, initially as a light-hearted cryptocurrency inspired by the Doge internet meme. Dogecoin’s official project history says Markus worked on the earliest Dogecoin Core releases before both founders left active development in 2014. The network has since been maintained by other open-source contributors.
The latest exchange also revives an unusual overlap between the Dogecoin ticker, DOGE, and the political shorthand previously used for the Department of Government Efficiency. Trump had earlier entertained the idea of a “DOGE dividend” tied to claimed government savings, but that proposal was separate from the cryptocurrency and did not produce nationwide $5,000 payments.
Arabian Post – Crypto News Network
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