In an interview last week, Elon Musk claimed he knows the true identity of Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto. The identity of the real inventor of Bitcoin remains a mystery almost a decade and a half after the whitepaper on the largest and most well-known cryptocurrency was published. Online rumors have persistently claimed that Elon Musk is the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, but Musk has always denied those assertions.
As for the interview in question, Musk had made other startling assertions in the same podcast, including claims of putting humans on Mars before the end of this decade. Asked when SpaceX will land a human being on the Red Planet, Musk claimed that it would take about ten years in the worst-case scenario. Musk is known to shoot from the hip, but his latest claims are now attracting much attention from many quarters.
Elon Musk's guess about the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto came in an episode of the Lex Fridman Podcast. Answering Fridman's question about whether Musk is the real Satoshi, the Tesla and SpaceX founder emphatically reiterated that he is not the mysterious Bitcoin creator. When pressed further about the ambiguity surrounding who founded Bitcoin, Musk took an extra-long pause before coming up with his theory on the identity of Nakamoto. According to him, computer scientist and cryptographer Nick Szabo is very likely the man who created Bitcoin as he wrote about many of the ideas related to cryptocurrencies much before the technology was born. For example, Szabo helped develop smart contracts and made an early form of cryptocurrency called Bit Gold before the invention of Bitcoin.
Szabo Denies Being Satoshi Nakamoto
Musk is not the first to speculate about Szabo being the elusive Bitcoin founder. There have been reams of newsprint and online articles devoted to establishing the Hungarian programmer as the creator of Bitcoin, including an article in the New York Times in 2017, which pointed at him being Satoshi Nakamoto. However, while many have speculated that Szabo could be the real Satoshi, the man himself has repeatedly denied those rumors. So it's not immediately clear if he knows about Musk's hypothesis and, if so, what he has to say about it.
The true identity of the Bitcoin inventor remains a mystery, and there are many claimants to that title. An Australian programmer called Craig Wright is one of them. However, many observers believe he is a conman who has nothing to do with creating the world's most popular cryptocurrency. Wright, however, recently won a Bitcoin-related court case filed against him by the family of his former business associate, Dave Kleiman. In its verdict, the Florida jury seemingly agreed with Wright's claims of being Satoshi Nakamoto while awarding $100 million in intellectual property rights to Kleiman's estate.
Source: Lex Fridman/YouTube, New York Times