Elon Musk's Cryptic Response to a Dogecoin Developer Has a Meta Joke

Software develop Michi Lumin, a core dev for the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, joked about needing to tweet obtuse and vague things and then hope that people will be able to interpret them as coded, meaningful, and mysterious. "This is already happening with @BillyM2k [Billy Markus] and of course @elonmusk [Elon Musk]," Lumin wrote. In  the next tweet, Lumin added that the tweets will be coded and mysterious but when decoded will be something like, "I aspire to curate the world's largest gravy collection" or "how many horsepower has a cow?"

[Update, July 19, 8am: This article has been updated to correct multiple errors. Michi Lumin was incorrectly identified as the creator of Dogecoin. Billy Markus was called Shibetoshi Nakamoto in multiple places, and also as the creator of Dogecoin.]

That was perhaps enough for Musk to respond in exactly the same manner that Lumin mentioned. The SpaceX and Tesla CEO simply responded with some numbers: "48 61 68 61 20 74 72 75 65." 

And then users on the micro-blogging site attempted to decode Musk's tweet. The top response came from the official handle of Baby Dogecoin, a token created with a mission to help save dogs. The Baby Dogecoin handle ran the text through a HEX to ASCII converter, and this gave the result "ASCII". Sharing a screenshot, Baby DogeCoin wrote, "Haha True."

Another user used the same method to decode Musk's tweet.

Billy Markus, one of the creators of Dogecoin, who uses the username Shibetoshi Nakamoto on Twitter, was also tagged on the first tweet, and jokingly replied, "Cabbage gridlock uncle meatball."

A user asked if Markus had anything else to add, he replied: "Random gibberish."

Here are some more reactions to Musk's tweet:

Musk is himself a cryptocurrency enthusiast and in recent time has been seen promoting Dogecoin in his trademark style involving meme, calling himself "The Dogefather", and even declaring himself the CEO of Dogecoin once. 

Last week, the 'Dogefather' tweeted about the Shiba Inu-face themed currency and it gained about 8 percent. Following a tweet by Dogecoin investor and YouTuber Matt Wallace, Musk wrote, "BTC [Bitcoin] and ETH [Ethereum] are pursuing a multilayer transaction system, but base layer transaction rate is slow and transaction cost is high."

"There is merit IMO to Doge maximizing base layer transaction rate and minimizing transaction cost with exchanges acting as the de facto secondary layer," he added.

At the time of writing (July 17, 1:33pm IST), Dogecoin price in India stood at Rs. 12.98.