Elon Musk Probably Invented Bitcoin

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Musk and Isaacson on Bitcoin Link

1. Satoshi Nakamoto probably is Elon Musk

2. Elon Musk is today’s Ben Franklin

3. Bitcoin could be more useful with Musk’s guidance

1. Satoshi probably is Elon

Is Musk capable of inventing Bitcoin? Probably.

  • The 2008 Bitcoin paper was written by someone who understands economics and cryptography. Musk founded and wrote production internet software for Zip2 and X.com / Paypal.
  • Bitcoin’s source code was written by someone with a mastery of C++. Musk clearly understands C++, insisting it be used at X.com and SpaceX.
  • Experience aside, Musk repeatedly absorbs and applies knowledge across fields to build products, like the Hyperloop, released alpha stage as a paper.

Would he have wanted to create it? Probably.

  • It was 2008 (Great Recession), and he may have been motivated to solve the lack of trust in banks by creating a currency that doesn’t need them.

Does the original Bitcoin paper sound like Musk? Somewhat.

Would Musk have stayed anonymous for 10 years? Probably, on principle.

  • Satoshi created Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer currency that wouldn’t need a central authority.

Did Musk reveal his identity in 2014 with this tweet? Maybe.

  • The tweet came one week after this Satoshi forum post.

Can Musk not own any bitcoin and still be Satoshi? Yes.

  • He has said publicly (October 2014) he doesn’t own any bitcoin, which is consistent with a “Good Satoshi” who deleted his private keys. This means Satoshi’s one million coins (worth about $8 billion as of November 2017) are gone for good.

Could Satoshi be a group of people? Probably not.

  • Satoshi could be a collaboration of Musk, Nick Szabo, and Hal Finney. But it seems more likely that Musk read their research papers, took inspiration, and built the product solo.

2. Musk is like Franklin

Musk identifies the most urgent problems of our time and spends his time to solve them: sustainable energy, multiplanetary life, AI safety.

Ben Franklin, likewise, “did what needed to be done, at the time it needed to be done”. He was a polymath entrepreneur who wrote public pamphlets for the general good, “A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency”. His pseudonym of choice? “Silence Dogood”.

Franklin and Musk have a few other fun coincidental things in common. Both

3. Bitcoin could use his help

Bitcoin has some problems. It had a major split (August 2017) and just avoided another. It takes at least 10 minutes to verify a transaction and its throughput is 5000 times less than that of credit cards.

If Musk invented Bitcoin, it seems like this knowledge would become public at some point anyway. But if it were public now, Musk could offer guidance as the currency’s “founding father”. (Vitalik Buterin does this for Ethereum.) Musk could coordinate changes in the block size and the lightning network and make bitcoin more useful.

Elon – if you are Satoshi, thank you. If not, well, thanks for inventing the Tesla Roadster.