In September 2018, the founder of Dogecoin was lying in bed, scrolling through Twitter, when a direct message appeared in his inbox. It was from Elon Musk.
The SpaceX and Tesla CEO was being plagued by “annoying scam spammers” and the software-engineer-turned-cryptocurrency-creator Jackson Palmer had a solution. They exchanged messages and Palmer shared some computer code that could help Musk.
The scammers had been bombarding Musk’s tweets with replies from fake accounts that mimicked his profile name and picture in an attempt to extort cryptocurrencies like bitcoin from his followers.
Palmer had written the script after becoming a target himself due to his high profile within the cryptocurrency community. Five years earlier he had become one of the early pioneers of the technology by creating a digital currency that…
