Do you know who Satoshi is? It was called after Satoshi Nakamoto, not the failed libertarian boat… country… thing. They may be one of the world’s wealthiest individuals, owing to a single game-changing idea. Satoshi Nakamoto is the inventor of Bitcoin. Now, you may have noticed that we stated “possibly” one of the wealthiest persons alive, and that is because Satoshi’s inclusion on that list is contingent on a number of unknowns.
For example, it presumes Satoshi is “one” when he or she may not be. It also requires Satoshi to be “alive,” while the inventor, for all we know, is long dead. In truth, we know very little about Satoshi – his name is a pseudonym, he has not heard from since 2014, and everyone who has ever proposed as the inventor’s alter ego has denied it.
However, this has not prevented individuals from expressing their thoughts on the subject. In addition, if there is one person who enjoys having an opinion, it is Elon Musk, the billionaire meme mogul. “I’m not [Satoshi],” Musk declared in an interview with artificial intelligence researcher Lex Fridman last week, adding that if he, he would tell us. However, he does have some theories about who is truly behind Bitcoin, and it is a little more abstract than you may think.
“Obviously, I have no idea who invented Bitcoin for practical purposes,” Musk remarked, “but… the history of concepts is quite evident before that.” “And it appears that more than anybody else; Nick Szabo is responsible for the development of those concepts.”
Nick Szabo is extremely secretive, so if you have not heard of him, it is probably on purpose. He has long seen to be a solid candidate for the “genuine” Satoshi by those knowledgeable: he is a cryptocurrency and blockchain specialist who has been active with Bitcoin since the beginning. He has identified as the creator based on language similarities between his work and Satoshi’s, and, probably most plausibly, he established his own money, “bit gold,” a decade before Bitcoin became popular.
Now, Szabo has repeatedly denied being Satoshi Nakamoto’s actual identity, and it is worth noting that Elon Musk was not asserting differently. What Musk was suggesting was that Szabo may not have been “the” creator of Bitcoin, but he was definitely instrumental in its development. “You can go at the history of ideas prior to bitcoin’s inception and see who wrote about those concepts,” Musk remarked. “He [Szabo] swears he isn’t Nakamoto, but… that’s beside the point. He appears to be the one most responsible for the bitcoin concepts than anybody else.”
In other words, the person most responsible for Bitcoin may not be Satoshi at all, according to Musk. Satoshi, whoever they are, may have invented cryptocurrencies, but it needed someone else to think up the concept in the first place — and Musk believes that person was Nick Szabo more than anybody else was. However, how does this affect the hunt for Satoshi? It may not matter in the long term, according to Musk. “What is a name?” he inquired of Fridman. “Is there a name for an idea?” “What does it even mean?” you might wonder.
