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One of my students believes Elon Musk and Peter Thiel created Bitcoin. Here's the summary of the 5 page doc he presented: In 2000, according to Peter Thiel, he

by pyman 1y ago

One of my students believes Elon Musk and Peter Thiel created Bitcoin. Here's the summary of the 5 page doc he presented: In 2000, according to Peter Thiel, he met with the E-Gold team in Anguilla. Around 2001, Elon and Peter were at PayPal, and they had plans to build a similar digital currency. In 2002, PayPal was sold, and that pretty much ended the digital currency plan. Instead, PayPal let users link their bank accounts and cards to make payments. This created a bigger dependency on banks. By 2004, there were over a million E‑Gold accounts. Banks weren’t happy about it. Meanwhile, Elon and Peter understood exactly how much potential this new kind of digital currency had. In 2007, the banks took the founders of E-Gold to court for running an unlicensed money‑transmitting business. That same year, the E-Gold engineers were out of work. Bitcoin was invented in 2008, the same year Elon was broke and busy trying to save both SpaceX and Tesla from going bankrupt. His theory is that Elon and Peter hired the smartest engineers from the E-Gold team and asked them to build blockchain so they could create their own version of E-Gold. The team worked on Bitcoin from 2007 to 2010 under the alias of Nakamoto.

FireBeyond 1y ago
> Around 2001, Elon and Peter were at PayPal, and they had plans to build a similar digital currency. > In 2002, PayPal was sold, and that pretty much ended the digital currency plan. Instead, PayPal let users link their bank accounts and cards to make payments. This created a bigger dependency on banks. This doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Except PayPal wasn't invented by Elon or Peter. It was Elon's company's plan to build the digital bank but they were failing quite spectacularly at it. They merged with Confinity who'd already built PayPal, had a working prototype, etc. Elon lasted four months as CEO of PayPal, trying to convert it from Java to ASP until the Board didn't ask him to resign, but fired him, the morning he left on his honeymoon after getting married. PayPal is a complete red herring there. Elon had no participation in ideas on digital currency there.
- FabHK 1y ago
  > They merged with Confinity who'd already built PayPal, had a working prototype, etc. Interesting, need to read about it. So similar story as with Tesla? Existing opinion nicely confirmed.
  - Suppafly 1y ago
    I've got a Confinity Paypal tshirt from a job fair I went to in 2000 or 2001 from back when they envisioned people using palm pilots to transfer money. I always think it's hilarious that people give Elon any credit for doing anything at the company.
    - pyman 1y ago
      The people who give him credit are the same people who sold PayPal for $1.5 billion in July 2002: Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, Luke Nosek, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Ken Howery, Jeremy Stoppelman, Russel Simmons. Elon was removed as CEO in 2000, but he remained the largest individual shareholder when PayPal went public.
    - kragen 1y ago
      I saw people using PalmPilots to transfer money on PayPal in 02001.
  - bostik 1y ago
    Some of the history between the two companies is covered in a book, "Paypal Wars.[0] Among other things it happens to spotlight Musk's fascination with having "X" as the company name, especially for a bank. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_PayPal_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_PayPal_Wars
    - everfrustrated 1y ago
      Yup. Also explains why X is trying to move into payments now. Elon seems to need to finish a vision he didn't get a chance to finish back then.
  - shkkmo 1y ago
    > So similar story as with Tesla? Existing opinion nicely confirmed. How is that similar? Tesla was 2 dudes and an office with no IP and no product when Musk became the lead investor and chairman of the board. Whereas when Cofinity and X.com merged it was as two functioning companies operating in the same market. What similarity do you see?
- pyman 1y ago
  So you are contradicting what Luke Nosek, the co-founder of PayPal, said? Luke: "Many people don’t know this, but the initial mission of PayPal was to create a global currency that was independent of interference by these, you know, corrupt cartels of banks and governments that were debasing their currencies.” Why should we believe you and not the person who created PayPal? https://finance.yahoo.com/news/paypal-originally-aimed-create-global-084300203.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/paypal-originally-aimed-creat...
  - FireBeyond 1y ago
    Uhhh... nothing I said contradicts Luke Nosek. Elon was working on a digital bank, not a global currency. His company was failing miserably. Confinity, who made PayPal, and had a first version working, merged with them. Elon gets no credit for a 'global currency' idea (nor do I think he and Thiel invented Bitcoin[1]), because Confinity was already working on that idea when they merged and became PayPal properly, in the four months before he was ousted. My argument was that Elon wasn't all about the global currency. [1] And Elon definitely didn't invent BitCoin. His ego would never permit him to have kept that a secret for a month, let alone a decade plus.
    - pyman 1y ago
      Context matters. The PayPal mafia (Musk, Nossk, Thiel, Levchin, Sacks, and the rest) spent years working closely, obsessing over banks, money, payments, and how to move value on the internet, questioning everything: What is money? Who controls it? How do you make it more efficient, global, and digital?
AdamJacobMuller 1y ago
Perhaps plausible until you mention that they hired a team to build it. There's no way, even if it was a single-digit number of people team that they would remain silent. If it was just Elon/Thiel I could perhaps believe it. Also keep in mind that there were some very desperate years for Elon where his companies were extremely close to bankruptcy, wouldn't he have tapped into that bitcoin if he had access to it?
- PUSH_AX 1y ago
  Because Elon is so humble…
  - DoesntMatter22 1y ago
    Seems fairly humble to me in that he's always thanking the team and giving them most of the credit.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - quinndexter 1y ago
      The definition of humility is not "doing the bare minimum."
      - DoesntMatter22 1y ago
        Can you name me a self made billionaire who is more humble?
        fennecbutt 1y ago
        Why would a humble billionaire pretend to be #1 in poe2 and then hire a team to run his pretend account, that's not humility that's deceit. Stop glazing him sheesh.
yellow_lead 1y ago
My counterpoint is that if Elon were involved in any way at all, he would have taken credit for it publicly by now.
- pyman 1y ago
  JPMorgan moves $10 trillion a day, according to Jamie Dimon. So there's the unwritten rule: you never upset the banks because that's the last thing you'll ever do. So why would the richest person on earth do that? He's not crazy.
  - notahacker 1y ago
    Back in the real world, plenty of people publicly associated with running major cryptocurrencies (and Craig Wright!) are walking around talking about how they invented the cryptocurrency and how it revolutionises banking, and plenty of people inventing infrastructure for promoting Bitcoin are doing deals with banks, whilst Elon is the sort of guy who goes to extreme lengths to piss off both political parties in the country that he and his businesses and his lucrative government contracts are based in, including ranting into the void about the most powerful and most sensitive man in the Western world is in the Epstein files when they had a fallout...
  - latexr 1y ago
    > So there's the unwritten rule: you never upset the banks because that's the last thing you'll ever do. What are they going to do? Whack him mafia style and make it look like an accident? Here’s a more realistic rule: “If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem”. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/214064-if-you-owe-the-bank-100-that-s-your-problem-if https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/214064-if-you-owe-the-bank-... > So why would the richest person on earth do that? He's not crazy. You mean the guy who is so insecure he constantly lies, even about the most inconsequential things… https://archive.ph/20250127023632/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/26/technology/elon-musk-video-games-diablo-path-of-exile.html https://archive.ph/20250127023632/https://www.nytimes.com/20... The guy who is so uninformed and gullible he falls for any conspiracy theory… https://www.techdirt.com/2024/10/25/lies-damned-lies-and-elon-musk/ https://www.techdirt.com/2024/10/25/lies-damned-lies-and-elo... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u8_fp1TtJE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u8_fp1TtJE The guy who jeopardised billions by buying into a random tweet accusing a business partner without proof… https://voz.us/en/world/250308/21932/mexican-tycoon-carlos-slim-cancels-telecommunications-projects-with-musk-after-allegations-of-ties-to-organized-crime.html https://voz.us/en/world/250308/21932/mexican-tycoon-carlos-s... The guy who invested all his time and energy electing someone like him, only to then (predictably) have a falling out… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Musk_feud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Musk_feud I mean, maybe he isn’t crazy, but that isn’t really an effective defense. Crazy people at least have an excuse.
smeeger 1y ago
[flagged]
razemio 1y ago
I do not think that Elon would not claim he is the inventor by now. The team theory makes this entirely unbelievable. Something like this can only be pulled of by 1-2 person's whith exceptional self-restraint.
- pyman 1y ago
  Peter Thiel said in one of his podcast he believes it was the E-Gold team who created Bitcoin under the alias of Nakamoto. He also confirmed he knew the team. But no one knows the names of the engineers or who financed them. All we know is that Elon and Peter revolutionised the finance industry with PayPal.
  - qoqpop 1y ago
    Video where he said he knew the team? In the main video, he just speculates that some people at the conference made bitcoin. Never provided even a claim to having evidence.
    - pyman 1y ago
      You've just created an account to ask that question? Wow :D https://kqmarkets.co.uk/article/did-peter-thiel-meet-satoshi-nakamoto https://kqmarkets.co.uk/article/did-peter-thiel-meet-satoshi... https://protos.com/is-peter-thiel-inner-circle-behind-the-satoshi-nakamoto-pseudonym/ https://protos.com/is-peter-thiel-inner-circle-behind-the-sa... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-21/peter-thiel-tells-miami-crowd-where-he-d-look-for-satoshi https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-21/peter-thi... "Peter Thiel met with the e-gold team in February 2000 on the Caribbean island of Anguilla to discuss making PayPal interoperable with e-gold. The goal was to challenge central banks by creating a system where PayPal and e-gold could work together. Thiel believed this collaboration could spark a revolution against traditional financial institutions." Actions speak louder than words. - Thiel met with digital currency pioneers in 2000. - Thiel chose not to partner with E-Gold because he needed to stay compliant and bank-friendly. - A few years later, Bitcoin quietly appears, solving the exact problems E-Gold ran into. - No names. No funding trail. No way for banks to know who the enemy is. Just Bitcoin wallets full of money. It doesn't sound like a bunch of idealistic cypherpunks building tech to save the world. It sounds like a few smart, well-connected people who understood how money moves, got frustrated with the banking system and their fees, and built a way to create wealth and move value without paying commissions. The cypherpunks laid the groundwork for the encryption banks, governments, and corporations now depend on. They were never interested in dodging taxes or avoiding bank fees.
l0ng1nu5 1y ago
It was jack.
Auracle 1y ago
Fun personal fact - the only reason I didn't invest more in Bitcoin (which would have definitely been enough to be FU money) was because I had some E-Gold when it was shut down.
- DoesntMatter22 1y ago
  Worse fun personal fact. I was planning to buy 5000 bitcoins on a Friday after work. A coworker convinced me and it made sense. Bitcoin was less than 2 a coin at that point. Then I go down the elevator in my building and there is a huge crowd of people. It ended up being 50 cent the rapper and a few other famous people. It was so surreal and unexpected I completely forgot about Bitcoin for a few months. And by then I could stand the fact it had tripled (or something) and I had missed it. Would have been hundreds of millions. Could have lost the hdd or had sold later but I'd always hold some. Lol so now I blame 50 cent that I didn't buy Bitcoin
  - tony69 1y ago
    You would’ve sold it way before it became FU money
    - b112 1y ago
      Indeed. That's what so many miss. One of the doge creators sold all his early doge for a used car. He'd hit the jackpot, a $5k return on something he rolled out in under a day's work, for fun. He didn't make the wrong decision. All his coin was worth 5 bucks, then 5900. What would you do?
    - DoesntMatter22 1y ago
      I doubt it, Ive held my Tesla shares since the beginning.
    - Auracle 1y ago
      People always say that but (obviously) never everyone does.
jasonvorhe 1y ago
If this at least involved Len Sassaman somehow, I'd find it at least worthy of digging in to this. Pass. Musk and Thiel being true cypherpunks? Come on. Musk hasn't had a single idea on his own, Thiel is way too busy coming up with ways to enslave everyone. No way they had anything to do with creating Bitcoin.
- pyman 1y ago
  Nick Szabo, Hal Finney, Peter Todd, and Adam Back were definitely part of the team after the paper was published. But Len Sassaman? I don't think so. > Musk and Thiel being true cypherpunks? Even cypherpunks had bills to pay. And who was hiring in 2007? The same people who disrupted the banking and oil industry with PayPal and Tesla.
  - xoralkindi 1y ago
    People always forget about the great Wei Dai, who like Nakamoto is already sort of pseudonymous, he also created Bmoney which is allot like Bitcoin. He is also the creator of the Crypto++ cryptography library for C++ (bitcoin is written in C++) From all the OG Cypherpunks he ticks allot of the boxes.
    - pyman 1y ago
      True. Nothing gets built in isolation. Bitcoin was the result of decades of work by cryptographers, economists, investors, and engineers
- kragen 1y ago
  Len went on for years about what a stupid idea Bitcoin was.
  - pyman 1y ago
    Agree. He was not impressed with Bitcoin
b112 1y ago
Any team involved would have long ago spilled the beans. Conspiracies are impossible to maintain, once more than one or two people are involved.
- kragen 1y ago
  Except for the secrecy of Colossus, Crypto AG, the 9/11 hijackings, Bill Cosby drugging and raping dozens of women, Peter Thiel funding lawsuits against Gawker, the Manhattan Project, the CIA-funded coup against Mossadegh, Stuxnet, the Five Families, most of what the NSA does, the Stealth Bomber, and so on. Almost all of those remained secret longer than the 17 years we're talking about here, and due to selection bias, I am forced to omit the much more successfully kept secrets, because I don't know about them yet.
  - b112 1y ago
    The selection bias, is discounting the endless conspiracies exposed daily. People go to jail, are caught out, fired, relationships break up, governments fall, because conspiracies of even a few people fall apart. It's a regular thing. You're mentioning some things, of which some were known during the time. The FBI had reports of the 9/11 hijackers, Bill Cosby was known by many but the women were paid off with cash or jobs (until they rightfully went public), and things such as the CIA and the Manhattan project are laced with highly patriotic people, and the death penalty or life in jail, along with people sequestered and watched by immense security. Secrets are very difficult to keep. The things you think of were enormously unusual in that they were kept. They were the exception to the rule.
    - kragen 1y ago
      Very plausibly the identity of Satoshi is already known to more people than Cosby's rapes or the 9/11 hijacking plans, before everybody knew about them. The hijacking plans weren't even well-known inside the FBI! And it's also very plausible that the people involved in Bitcoin were either strongly idealistic, facing death penalties for disclosure (for example, if they work for the Mossad), or both. I agree with your weakened claim that secrets are very difficult to keep, but much of modern society is built on institutions that are very good at keeping them: armies, intelligence agencies, and even companies with trade secrets. I agree that Satoshi was probably just one or two people, and the difficulty in keeping secrets with more than a few people is one of my reasons for that. But you said it was impossible, not difficult, which is much too extreme to be justifiable. (I think it's about 50% likely that it's one of a couple of dozen people I've met personally, but I wouldn't be able to convince anyone else. So you might be talking to one of the people in the position of Bill Cosby's friends before the news came out.)
OtherShrezzing 1y ago
Just applying Occams Razor here, this whole story makes more sense if the E-Gold engineers just bootstrapped this project without Musk/Thiel involvement. E-Golds most talented 1-2 engineers weren’t poor people, and could definitely afford a 5 year career break.

by pyman 1y ago

FireBeyond 1y ago

> Around 2001, Elon and Peter were at PayPal, and they had plans to build a similar digital currency. > In 2002, PayPal was sold, and that pretty much ended the digital currency plan. Instead, PayPal let users link their bank accounts and cards to make payments. This created a bigger dependency on banks. This doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Except PayPal wasn't invented by Elon or Peter. It was Elon's company's plan to build the digital bank but they were failing quite spectacularly at it. They merged with Confinity who'd already built PayPal, had a working prototype, etc. Elon lasted four months as CEO of PayPal, trying to convert it from Java to ASP until the Board didn't ask him to resign, but fired him, the morning he left on his honeymoon after getting married. PayPal is a complete red herring there. Elon had no participation in ideas on digital currency there.

FabHK 1y ago
> They merged with Confinity who'd already built PayPal, had a working prototype, etc. Interesting, need to read about it. So similar story as with Tesla? Existing opinion nicely confirmed.
- Suppafly 1y ago
  I've got a Confinity Paypal tshirt from a job fair I went to in 2000 or 2001 from back when they envisioned people using palm pilots to transfer money. I always think it's hilarious that people give Elon any credit for doing anything at the company.
  - pyman 1y ago
    The people who give him credit are the same people who sold PayPal for $1.5 billion in July 2002: Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, Luke Nosek, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Ken Howery, Jeremy Stoppelman, Russel Simmons. Elon was removed as CEO in 2000, but he remained the largest individual shareholder when PayPal went public.
  - kragen 1y ago
    I saw people using PalmPilots to transfer money on PayPal in 02001.
- bostik 1y ago
  Some of the history between the two companies is covered in a book, "Paypal Wars.[0] Among other things it happens to spotlight Musk's fascination with having "X" as the company name, especially for a bank. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_PayPal_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_PayPal_Wars
  - everfrustrated 1y ago
    Yup. Also explains why X is trying to move into payments now. Elon seems to need to finish a vision he didn't get a chance to finish back then.
- shkkmo 1y ago
  > So similar story as with Tesla? Existing opinion nicely confirmed. How is that similar? Tesla was 2 dudes and an office with no IP and no product when Musk became the lead investor and chairman of the board. Whereas when Cofinity and X.com merged it was as two functioning companies operating in the same market. What similarity do you see?
pyman 1y ago
So you are contradicting what Luke Nosek, the co-founder of PayPal, said? Luke: "Many people don’t know this, but the initial mission of PayPal was to create a global currency that was independent of interference by these, you know, corrupt cartels of banks and governments that were debasing their currencies.” Why should we believe you and not the person who created PayPal? https://finance.yahoo.com/news/paypal-originally-aimed-create-global-084300203.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/paypal-originally-aimed-creat...
- FireBeyond 1y ago
  Uhhh... nothing I said contradicts Luke Nosek. Elon was working on a digital bank, not a global currency. His company was failing miserably. Confinity, who made PayPal, and had a first version working, merged with them. Elon gets no credit for a 'global currency' idea (nor do I think he and Thiel invented Bitcoin[1]), because Confinity was already working on that idea when they merged and became PayPal properly, in the four months before he was ousted. My argument was that Elon wasn't all about the global currency. [1] And Elon definitely didn't invent BitCoin. His ego would never permit him to have kept that a secret for a month, let alone a decade plus.
  - pyman 1y ago
    Context matters. The PayPal mafia (Musk, Nossk, Thiel, Levchin, Sacks, and the rest) spent years working closely, obsessing over banks, money, payments, and how to move value on the internet, questioning everything: What is money? Who controls it? How do you make it more efficient, global, and digital?

AdamJacobMuller 1y ago

Perhaps plausible until you mention that they hired a team to build it. There's no way, even if it was a single-digit number of people team that they would remain silent. If it was just Elon/Thiel I could perhaps believe it. Also keep in mind that there were some very desperate years for Elon where his companies were extremely close to bankruptcy, wouldn't he have tapped into that bitcoin if he had access to it?

PUSH_AX 1y ago
Because Elon is so humble…
- DoesntMatter22 1y ago
  Seems fairly humble to me in that he's always thanking the team and giving them most of the credit.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - quinndexter 1y ago
    The definition of humility is not "doing the bare minimum."
    - DoesntMatter22 1y ago
      Can you name me a self made billionaire who is more humble?
      - fennecbutt 1y ago
        Why would a humble billionaire pretend to be #1 in poe2 and then hire a team to run his pretend account, that's not humility that's deceit. Stop glazing him sheesh.

yellow_lead 1y ago

My counterpoint is that if Elon were involved in any way at all, he would have taken credit for it publicly by now.

pyman 1y ago
JPMorgan moves $10 trillion a day, according to Jamie Dimon. So there's the unwritten rule: you never upset the banks because that's the last thing you'll ever do. So why would the richest person on earth do that? He's not crazy.
- notahacker 1y ago
  Back in the real world, plenty of people publicly associated with running major cryptocurrencies (and Craig Wright!) are walking around talking about how they invented the cryptocurrency and how it revolutionises banking, and plenty of people inventing infrastructure for promoting Bitcoin are doing deals with banks, whilst Elon is the sort of guy who goes to extreme lengths to piss off both political parties in the country that he and his businesses and his lucrative government contracts are based in, including ranting into the void about the most powerful and most sensitive man in the Western world is in the Epstein files when they had a fallout...
- latexr 1y ago
  > So there's the unwritten rule: you never upset the banks because that's the last thing you'll ever do. What are they going to do? Whack him mafia style and make it look like an accident? Here’s a more realistic rule: “If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem”. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/214064-if-you-owe-the-bank-100-that-s-your-problem-if https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/214064-if-you-owe-the-bank-... > So why would the richest person on earth do that? He's not crazy. You mean the guy who is so insecure he constantly lies, even about the most inconsequential things… https://archive.ph/20250127023632/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/26/technology/elon-musk-video-games-diablo-path-of-exile.html https://archive.ph/20250127023632/https://www.nytimes.com/20... The guy who is so uninformed and gullible he falls for any conspiracy theory… https://www.techdirt.com/2024/10/25/lies-damned-lies-and-elon-musk/ https://www.techdirt.com/2024/10/25/lies-damned-lies-and-elo... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u8_fp1TtJE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u8_fp1TtJE The guy who jeopardised billions by buying into a random tweet accusing a business partner without proof… https://voz.us/en/world/250308/21932/mexican-tycoon-carlos-slim-cancels-telecommunications-projects-with-musk-after-allegations-of-ties-to-organized-crime.html https://voz.us/en/world/250308/21932/mexican-tycoon-carlos-s... The guy who invested all his time and energy electing someone like him, only to then (predictably) have a falling out… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Musk_feud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Musk_feud I mean, maybe he isn’t crazy, but that isn’t really an effective defense. Crazy people at least have an excuse.

smeeger 1y ago

[flagged]

razemio 1y ago

I do not think that Elon would not claim he is the inventor by now. The team theory makes this entirely unbelievable. Something like this can only be pulled of by 1-2 person's whith exceptional self-restraint.

pyman 1y ago
Peter Thiel said in one of his podcast he believes it was the E-Gold team who created Bitcoin under the alias of Nakamoto. He also confirmed he knew the team. But no one knows the names of the engineers or who financed them. All we know is that Elon and Peter revolutionised the finance industry with PayPal.
- qoqpop 1y ago
  Video where he said he knew the team? In the main video, he just speculates that some people at the conference made bitcoin. Never provided even a claim to having evidence.
  - pyman 1y ago
    You've just created an account to ask that question? Wow :D https://kqmarkets.co.uk/article/did-peter-thiel-meet-satoshi-nakamoto https://kqmarkets.co.uk/article/did-peter-thiel-meet-satoshi... https://protos.com/is-peter-thiel-inner-circle-behind-the-satoshi-nakamoto-pseudonym/ https://protos.com/is-peter-thiel-inner-circle-behind-the-sa... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-21/peter-thiel-tells-miami-crowd-where-he-d-look-for-satoshi https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-21/peter-thi... "Peter Thiel met with the e-gold team in February 2000 on the Caribbean island of Anguilla to discuss making PayPal interoperable with e-gold. The goal was to challenge central banks by creating a system where PayPal and e-gold could work together. Thiel believed this collaboration could spark a revolution against traditional financial institutions." Actions speak louder than words. - Thiel met with digital currency pioneers in 2000. - Thiel chose not to partner with E-Gold because he needed to stay compliant and bank-friendly. - A few years later, Bitcoin quietly appears, solving the exact problems E-Gold ran into. - No names. No funding trail. No way for banks to know who the enemy is. Just Bitcoin wallets full of money. It doesn't sound like a bunch of idealistic cypherpunks building tech to save the world. It sounds like a few smart, well-connected people who understood how money moves, got frustrated with the banking system and their fees, and built a way to create wealth and move value without paying commissions. The cypherpunks laid the groundwork for the encryption banks, governments, and corporations now depend on. They were never interested in dodging taxes or avoiding bank fees.

l0ng1nu5 1y ago

It was jack.

Auracle 1y ago

Fun personal fact - the only reason I didn't invest more in Bitcoin (which would have definitely been enough to be FU money) was because I had some E-Gold when it was shut down.

DoesntMatter22 1y ago
Worse fun personal fact. I was planning to buy 5000 bitcoins on a Friday after work. A coworker convinced me and it made sense. Bitcoin was less than 2 a coin at that point. Then I go down the elevator in my building and there is a huge crowd of people. It ended up being 50 cent the rapper and a few other famous people. It was so surreal and unexpected I completely forgot about Bitcoin for a few months. And by then I could stand the fact it had tripled (or something) and I had missed it. Would have been hundreds of millions. Could have lost the hdd or had sold later but I'd always hold some. Lol so now I blame 50 cent that I didn't buy Bitcoin
- tony69 1y ago
  You would’ve sold it way before it became FU money
  - b112 1y ago
    Indeed. That's what so many miss. One of the doge creators sold all his early doge for a used car. He'd hit the jackpot, a $5k return on something he rolled out in under a day's work, for fun. He didn't make the wrong decision. All his coin was worth 5 bucks, then 5900. What would you do?
  - DoesntMatter22 1y ago
    I doubt it, Ive held my Tesla shares since the beginning.
  - Auracle 1y ago
    People always say that but (obviously) never everyone does.

jasonvorhe 1y ago

If this at least involved Len Sassaman somehow, I'd find it at least worthy of digging in to this. Pass. Musk and Thiel being true cypherpunks? Come on. Musk hasn't had a single idea on his own, Thiel is way too busy coming up with ways to enslave everyone. No way they had anything to do with creating Bitcoin.

pyman 1y ago
Nick Szabo, Hal Finney, Peter Todd, and Adam Back were definitely part of the team after the paper was published. But Len Sassaman? I don't think so. > Musk and Thiel being true cypherpunks? Even cypherpunks had bills to pay. And who was hiring in 2007? The same people who disrupted the banking and oil industry with PayPal and Tesla.
- xoralkindi 1y ago
  People always forget about the great Wei Dai, who like Nakamoto is already sort of pseudonymous, he also created Bmoney which is allot like Bitcoin. He is also the creator of the Crypto++ cryptography library for C++ (bitcoin is written in C++) From all the OG Cypherpunks he ticks allot of the boxes.
  - pyman 1y ago
    True. Nothing gets built in isolation. Bitcoin was the result of decades of work by cryptographers, economists, investors, and engineers
kragen 1y ago
Len went on for years about what a stupid idea Bitcoin was.
- pyman 1y ago
  Agree. He was not impressed with Bitcoin

b112 1y ago

Any team involved would have long ago spilled the beans. Conspiracies are impossible to maintain, once more than one or two people are involved.

kragen 1y ago
Except for the secrecy of Colossus, Crypto AG, the 9/11 hijackings, Bill Cosby drugging and raping dozens of women, Peter Thiel funding lawsuits against Gawker, the Manhattan Project, the CIA-funded coup against Mossadegh, Stuxnet, the Five Families, most of what the NSA does, the Stealth Bomber, and so on. Almost all of those remained secret longer than the 17 years we're talking about here, and due to selection bias, I am forced to omit the much more successfully kept secrets, because I don't know about them yet.
- b112 1y ago
  The selection bias, is discounting the endless conspiracies exposed daily. People go to jail, are caught out, fired, relationships break up, governments fall, because conspiracies of even a few people fall apart. It's a regular thing. You're mentioning some things, of which some were known during the time. The FBI had reports of the 9/11 hijackers, Bill Cosby was known by many but the women were paid off with cash or jobs (until they rightfully went public), and things such as the CIA and the Manhattan project are laced with highly patriotic people, and the death penalty or life in jail, along with people sequestered and watched by immense security. Secrets are very difficult to keep. The things you think of were enormously unusual in that they were kept. They were the exception to the rule.
  - kragen 1y ago
    Very plausibly the identity of Satoshi is already known to more people than Cosby's rapes or the 9/11 hijacking plans, before everybody knew about them. The hijacking plans weren't even well-known inside the FBI! And it's also very plausible that the people involved in Bitcoin were either strongly idealistic, facing death penalties for disclosure (for example, if they work for the Mossad), or both. I agree with your weakened claim that secrets are very difficult to keep, but much of modern society is built on institutions that are very good at keeping them: armies, intelligence agencies, and even companies with trade secrets. I agree that Satoshi was probably just one or two people, and the difficulty in keeping secrets with more than a few people is one of my reasons for that. But you said it was impossible, not difficult, which is much too extreme to be justifiable. (I think it's about 50% likely that it's one of a couple of dozen people I've met personally, but I wouldn't be able to convince anyone else. So you might be talking to one of the people in the position of Bill Cosby's friends before the news came out.)

OtherShrezzing 1y ago

Just applying Occams Razor here, this whole story makes more sense if the E-Gold engineers just bootstrapped this project without Musk/Thiel involvement. E-Golds most talented 1-2 engineers weren’t poor people, and could definitely afford a 5 year career break.