Elon Musk, the tech billionaire recently appeared on Lex Fridman’s popular podcast where he discussed various topics including AI, Tesla, and cryptocurrencies. However, what caught everyone’s attention was his prediction about who he thinks could be the potential Bitcoin creator.
Musk first made it clear that he is definitely not the Bitcoin creator and then went on to predict that hyper-secretive cryptocurrency expert Nick Szabo could be the original Satoshi Nakamoto. He explained,
“You can look at the evolution of ideas before the launch of bitcoin and see who wrote about those ideas. It seems as though Nick Szabo is probably, more than anyone else, responsible for the evolution of those ideas. He claims not to be Nakamoto, but I’m not sure that’s neither here nor there. But he seems to be the one more responsible for the ideas behind bitcoin than anyone else.”
Bitcoin has grown to become a $2 trillion asset class over the past decade, however, there is still no clarity on who created it. The pseudo-anonymous BTC creator Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin in 2008 and went anonymous right after its launch in 2019, erasing every possible digital signature leaving no trace. There have been numerous speculations about the identity of the original creator and many have claimed to know the real individual behind it but none has offered any conclusive evidence.
Szabo’s writing and Bitcoin whitepaper seems “uncanny”
A 2014 report by a team of linguistics indicated the uncanny similarities between the Bitcoin whitepaper writing and Szabo’s writing. They claimed that the number of linguistic similarities between the two is something that makes him the closest guess to be the original Satoshi.
“The number of linguistic similarities between Szabo’s writing and the bitcoin whitepaper is uncanny,” the researchers said, adding that “none of the other possible authors were anywhere near as good of a match.”
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