PayPal founder Peter Thiel thinks he knows him
At a conference in Miami, PayPal founder Peter Thiel reported that he might have met the legendary Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto – on a beach in the Caribbean.
Multi-billionaire Peter Thiel is CEO of big data company Palantir and head of various venture capital firms and hedge funds. At the turn of the millennium, Thiel co-founded Paypal. He is Facebook’s first investor. Some would call him a living legend.
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Caribbean beach 2000: Thiel meets Nakamoto – maybe
Now Thiel has loud Bloomberg tells on a small scale that he may have met another (possibly no longer) living legend himself – namely on the beach on the Antilles island of Anguilla in February 2000. Thiel is convinced that this legend could have been the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto.
Thiel expressed this suspicion on Wednesday when he attended an early meeting with the then founders of E-Gold Ltd. remembered. E-Gold was the name of a now defunct digital currency that was developed by the company of the same name.
“I met her in February 2000 on the beach in Anguilla. We started the revolution against the central banks on the beach in Anguilla. We wanted to make PayPal interoperable with e-gold and blow up all central banks, ”said Thiel. However, things did not turn out as expected. There should have been accusations of fraud, defamation and ultimately a legal agreement with E-Gold.
But Satoshi Nakamoto could have been one of about 200 people at this first meeting on the beach. It is likely that he has learned from the mistakes of e-gold.
“Bitcoin was the answer to e-gold, and Satoshi learned that you have to be anonymous and not have a company,” Thiel believes and adds: “Even a company, even any type of company would be too close to the government.”
Thiel says he didn’t go back or try to figure out who exactly that person could have been on the beach. That would also be good advice for the current time, because speculations about Satoshi Nakamoto would only play into the cards of the crypto critics.
Because one thing would also be clear: “If we knew who he is, the government would arrest him”.
The digital peer-to-peer currency Bitcoin first appeared in the public eye on Halloween 2008. A person who called himself Satoshi Nakamoto had published a paper entitled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”, but did not identify himself.
Since the rise of bitcoin, finding the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto has become a popular game. The media has linked a dozen or so people with the name Nakamoto over the years. Australian entrepreneur Craig Steven Wright was the only person who aggressively claimed to be Nakamoto. Wright has never proven his claim.
One of the most likely speculations at the moment seems to be that Satoshi Nakamoto could have been the developer Len Sassaman, who died in 2011. This is supported by the fact that Satoshi Nakamoto’s last known message was published two months before Sassaman’s death. In addition, Sassaman is said to have used the same British English as Satoshi Nakamoto in his tweets.
The digital wallets attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto contain more than a million bitcoins – the equivalent of more than $ 64 billion. If Satoshi had been Sassaman, the explanation for the fact that the bitcoins are untouched would have been found quickly.
