Did Elon Musk Create Bitcoin? (cryptocoinsnews.com) 189
An anonymous reader quotes CryptoCoinsNews:
It should be no surprise that the elusive hunt for Satoshi, often referred to as the father of Bitcoin, has led to the theory that Elon Musk has been hiding a big secret from all of us. Sahil Gupta, a computer science student at Yale University and former intern at SpaceX, believes just this... Bitcoin was written by someone with mastery of C++, a language Musk has utilized heavily at SpaceX. Musk's 2013 Hyperloop paper also provided insight into his deep understanding of cryptography and economics...
One week before Gupta's Medium post on Musk, another Medium blog was published with a theory that Musk invented Bitcoin for future use on Mars. As radical as this may sounds, the point around Paypal in this article was relevant. Musk has already revolutionized digital currency with his founding role in Paypal, which he sold to eBay in 2002. The author claims Musk is under a non-compete from this deal, leaving him to secrecy about his role in Bitcoin.
Gupta's article cites other clues that suport his theory, including Musk's interest in solving global problems, his unusual silence on the topic of cryptocurrencies, and the fact that "Elon has said publicly he doesn't own any bitcoin, which is consistent with a 'Good Satoshi' who deleted his private keys. This means Satoshi's one million coins (worth about $8 billion) are gone for good." And of course, with a net worth of $19.7 billion, Elon Musk is one of the few people who wouldn't need the money.
UPDATE (11/28/17): On Twitter, Elon Musk has responded, saying the rumors that he created Bitcoin are "not true."
One week before Gupta's Medium post on Musk, another Medium blog was published with a theory that Musk invented Bitcoin for future use on Mars. As radical as this may sounds, the point around Paypal in this article was relevant. Musk has already revolutionized digital currency with his founding role in Paypal, which he sold to eBay in 2002. The author claims Musk is under a non-compete from this deal, leaving him to secrecy about his role in Bitcoin.
Gupta's article cites other clues that suport his theory, including Musk's interest in solving global problems, his unusual silence on the topic of cryptocurrencies, and the fact that "Elon has said publicly he doesn't own any bitcoin, which is consistent with a 'Good Satoshi' who deleted his private keys. This means Satoshi's one million coins (worth about $8 billion) are gone for good." And of course, with a net worth of $19.7 billion, Elon Musk is one of the few people who wouldn't need the money.
UPDATE (11/28/17): On Twitter, Elon Musk has responded, saying the rumors that he created Bitcoin are "not true."
ObBetteridge (Score:3, Informative)
No.
Re: (Score:2)
Or to rephrase: hell no.
Musk worship is out of control (Score:1)
If he did, it would be the only thing Elon has ever introduced to the market that actually had net positive financial value.
So no, he did not.
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Re:ObBetteridge (Score:4, Insightful)
Elon Musk may be something of a genius when it comes to turning government subsidies into pocket cash, but this is just plain tinfoil hat territory.
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Heh. Slashdot caught me by surprise and I was actually going along with it, until "created it for use on Mars".
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As long as he keeps lowering the cost to Earth orbit, I'm happy to help give him subsidies for pocket cash. What new exploration are you opening up?
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No.
There is no way that a man who has devoted his life to preserving the earth's resources created a currency that consumes them at an exponentially increasing rate.
Either that, or he created his companies as a way to make amends for his mistake...
Don't know who created it (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Don't know who created it (Score:5, Funny)
Trump is best at mining. His little hands can dig into the ether and get the tiny coins out.
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Trump is best at mining. His little hands can dig into the ether and get the tiny coins out.
Trump ... digging for something ... with his hands? Nah. Never happened.
But hey, he knows how a shovel works. [washingtonexaminer.com]
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He only falsely allegedly never mentioned grabbing them in the pussy...
Totally unrelated, and FAKE!!!
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That was actually Hillary's voice on that fake tape that doesn't exist. She's SO good at imitating Trump because she's desperate to be President (sad!) you've never heard a better Trump impersonator than Hillary. She's the BEST at being crooked. She's so good some people call her Crooked Hillary!
Ohhh! Ice cream! Two scoops for me!
Keyser Soze and me (Score:3)
It was a collaboration, but I can't tell you that because... Keyser Soze. I know you doubt me; the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing us he doesn't exist. I figure somehow this hurt the Hungarians.
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conflating art and the artist leads to grief and idolatry. We'd practically have to burn every great painting otherwise, those sad lechers. It's a shame about Spacey but that doesn't lessen how he might have moved you with his performance. As Neil Young once sang "[Where] Even Richard Nixon has got Soul".
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And then deny it shortly after
Re:Don't know who created it (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think Musk could keep quiet about it either. In fact knowing him he would have promised it would overtake Visa by the end of the year and released a solar powered mining rig that also charges your car.
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Al Gore already claimed credit.
Re: (Score:1)
Please show your work.
Re:Haha what? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hell, I know C++ (I used to have a desk next to someone on the standards committee) and I know cryptography (I was part of the OpenPGP working group and wrote a conforming implementation from the draft spec alone just to prove that the spec was good enough).
Why is nobody claiming I'm Satoshi?
Apart from the fact that I already have a pretty good pseudonym, and that I clearly don't have Satoshi-level crypto knowledge, the real reason is that I'm nobody. Satoshi was a mythical lone genius, which means he must be someone that most people have heard on. Only people with had-a-voice-role-on-The-Simpsons-level fame get attached to rumours like this.
Re: Haha what? (Score:5, Funny)
Very clever, Satoshi, very clever.
Re: (Score:2)
Because if you owned $8 billion plus in bitcoins we would expect that you'd cash them in at some point, and that would be bad for all the Slashdot editors who are heavily invested in bitcoins.
However, if Musk owns $8 billion in bitcoins we might hope he deleted them, avoiding the sword of Damocles (except for all the other early adopters who own bazillions of dollars worth).
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True enough. If I had $8 billion in bitcoins... well, I might not cash out all of them...
Re: Haha what? (Score:2, Insightful)
Satoshi, whoever he is, does not have $8 billion in BTC.
There isn't anyone who would pay you $8 billion, or even a single billion, for any amount of BTC. The people with BTC sell tiny slices to suckers (aka investors) and pocket the cash or invest it in sometging with value. BTC has made no progress towards being a legitimate option, it's still just as much of a pyramid scheme today as it was at the start.
It'll cost you $60 just to conduct a BTC transaction today. And maybe it'll process in a few weeks.
Re: Haha what? (Score:2)
Re: Haha what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Why is nobody claiming I'm Satoshi?
Hell, gimme a hundred or two of those bitcoins and I'll call you whatever you want :P
Re: (Score:1)
"Satoshi-level crypto knowledge" isn't a very high barrier. Bitcoin was assembled from well-known algorithms and protocols. See Narayanan and Clark, "Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree" [acm.org].
The innovation by the inventor(s) of Bitcoin ("Satoshi") was to put those pieces together in a particular way, under a catchy name, at the right time.
Which is what most inventors do, after all; I don't want to diminish the achievement. It's not every day that someone cobbles together something a bit different out of well-known idea
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I guess my point, such as it is, is that there are at least a couple of thousand people in the world who tick most of the specific boxes in this story, plus a few the story didn't consider.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It doesn't really even confirm that Musk knows c++ only that it is used at his company.
Likewise, the claim that Musk has a "deep knowledge of cryptography", is based on the fact that it was mentioned in a paper that that he co-wrote with other people.
This is stupider than the flat earth conspiracy.
Re: (Score:2)
Go ahead and laugh, just wait until Musk assembles his new company, RetroChronX, and they invent the first time machine. Then he'll go back in time, invent Bitcoin himself for real, and prove you naysayers wrong. While he's at it, he's going to (retro)invent the the microprocessor, Linux, and the Internet too!
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Nope. Flat earth is still stupider... This is possible, no matter how improbable while flat earth is impossible.
Agree with the rest and also that the actual probability is equal to or less than that of me winning the lotto by finding a ticket on the ground.
Re: Haha what? (Score:1)
I completely agree, but if you are having a meeting with Musk about a software product, go into it with the technical details. He will ask about middleware layers, frameworks, back-end tech, etc.
Most CEOs could give a shit.
Do we need even more demented "stories"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because this is a new low in a series of very low quality stories that recently made it on slashdot. While the comments also seem to have slipped and the idiots seem to have the majority now, I do not think they should be catered to.
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It kinda makes sense when you think about it, though... tech news is filled with Bitcoin hype articles and Elon Hype articles right now, so it only makes sense to combine them.
Now, if they find a way to include Apple or Net Neutrality in that story, they will have hit the tech news trifecta! Bonus points all around!
Re: (Score:1)
They should rename the site in honor of “Chips & Dips” to “Shits & Giggles.” At least then, the Digg-quality submissions wouldn’t be so unexpected.
No, it was me! (Score:1)
I am Spartacus! And the Lindbergh baby! And I shot JR! But I never shot the deputy.
(Secret BitCoin Code embedded in this post. Use it to generate 1 billion bitcoins.)
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Musk doesn't talk about his dumps either (Score:2, Insightful)
"Elon Musk doesn't talk about cryptocurrencies, therefore he must have invented bitcoin."
The stupid, it hurts.
Somebody spent about a decade in elementary school. Must have been quite the status symbol to be the only 5th grader driving to school.
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This seems like absolute bullshit (Score:1)
As if he's got enough free time to do this as a side project.
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Re: (Score:1)
Exactly. Anyone who's run a business knows how little time you have when you're in a situation like that.
Re: This seems like absolute bullshit (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Well I'm guessing being CEO of a company sending rockets into space means you're a lot busier than I was in the projects I've worked on trying to find bugs in customer code so they could release. But even on those projects I didn't have time to do something like BitCoin on the side.
No. (Score:5, Funny)
The answer is "no", and someone seriously needs to loosen their tinfoil hat.
Re: (Score:1)
Elon's plans fully revealed! (Score:3, Funny)
Elon has been secretly buying even more Bitcoins with all his government grants to prop up TESLA. Those GigaFactories, are really covert Bitcoin mines which are powered by... wait for it... his SolarCity project.
Ultimately, Elon is a visionary. Whilst everyone is talking about Bitcoin going to the moon, Elon had plans to take it to mars all along... enter SpaceX!
What about the underground Boring company you ask? That's his version of puting all his cold wallet stored Bitcoins in the ground, like gold, except 1 Bitcoin is now worth more than 1oz of gold, so you gotta have much bigger holes in the ground. The Hyperloop was just a pet project to ensure he could quickly access all his geographically dispersed underground cold storage Bitcoins, should the need ever arise.
Finally though, he saw that AI would be smart enough to figure out where he stashed all his Bitcoins, so he's come up with the NeuroLace project to enhance the human capacity to memorize Bitcoin brain wallet addresses, whilst still ensuring a high degree of entropy.
odds (Score:5, Insightful)
What are the odds that the one famous person who knows c+ did this, and the other millions of smart non famous programmers, didn't.
I know we love our celebrities but come on. Besides hes got an ego the size of the moon. There is no way he is not bragging about inventing bitcoin.
Re: (Score:2)
It's almost certain that Satoshi is a) more than one person, and b) composed of individuals who are not household names.
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Also c) not an economics major
So Governments Don't Know Who Satoshi Is Either? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
They already do.
How the NSA identified satoshi [slashdot.org]
wouldn't need the money?! (Score:1)
Oh please! Shirley you're not serious. Find me a billionaire who actually believes that! Bezoz is his target... This is animal instinct. The only thing on their mind is "more"...
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I don't think this is true, but if we allow the possibility for a moment, when Elon is going to need the money is when he does the big lift to Mars. Elon is not going to want to live like a pioneer on Mars - he's going to want to live well and this is going to require basically putting up a BFR every day for a couple years at a minimum; this is something that will cost trillions of dollars. If Elon were Satoshi the time to cash out is when Bitcoin replaces the central banking system not before. The timin
No (Score:2)
clues that suport his theory
There are no "clues" in the articles, just drivel. Two of the articles describe the ideas as "oddball" and that's right. There's no point in wasting time on conspiracy theorists and their "theories".
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No (Score:1)
Is there any low-quality schlock submission that EditorDavid won’t post? This is shit even by EditorDavid standards.
Wow. Just... wow. (Score:2)
This is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve seen or heard in a long, long time.
C++? What a coincidence! (Score:5, Insightful)
Bitcoin was written by someone with mastery of C++, a language Musk has utilized heavily at SpaceX.
a) Musk personally, or the people Musk employs at SpaceX?
b) It's C++. It's not exactly esoteric. You know I heard that DB Cooper spoke English, and so does Clint Eastwood... coincideeeence?
Huh? (Score:2)
Sounds like a poorly written fanfic to me.
First headline to break Betteridge's Law? (Score:5, Insightful)
No.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Mandatory XKCD (Score:5, Funny)
Given how delusional his fanboys are (Score:5, Funny)
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Hell, the way it's going the universe will have been created just so that Elon can be doing all of His wonderful stuff.
One in a million chance (Score:2)
I know C++, I learned economics and crypto at school, I also own a credit card. That obviously makes me a master of cryptocurrencies. /facepalm
But this is not enough, so let me prove you I am Satoshi : I don't own any bitcoin, and I don't bring the topic on bitcoin for unrelated conversations.
And if that story makes sense, it would make sense for millions of people. Nice story though. I would have preferred Steve Jobs though, leaving us with bitcoin just before his death, and getting buried with the private
In other news... (Score:2)
It was revealed that Elon Musk actually invented baseball. Also apple pie.
Re: (Score:1)
That reminds me a conversation from some years ago (originally in Spanish, quoted from memory):
"Some people think that Al Gore invented the Internet"
"Al Gore? Isn't that the guy who invented the Al-Gorithms?"
"Yeah, and he created the Gore Cinema genre".
"And invented Goretex"
"And discovered Goreland"
(The last one made more sense in Spanish: Greenland -> Groenlandia -> Gorelandia)
Consistent with available evidence ... (Score:2)
and the fact that "Elon has said publicly he doesn't own any bitcoin, which is consistent with a 'Good Satoshi' who deleted his private keys.
Being consistent with some theory is a pretty low standard, something even creationists and fake moon landing theorists achieve.
Re: Consistent with available evidence ... (Score:2)
and fake moon landing theorists achieve
On a reeeally good day.
No, but he did create... (Score:3)
Betteridge's Law (Score:2)
'Nuff said.
Move along folks, nothing to see.
Not interested (Score:2)
I thought it was Kim Jong-un (Score:1)
Why delete the key? (Score:1)
At one million bitcoins if the key was still around what about selling it of slowly and invest in stocks and use that profit to improve the situation for man kind or something?
If bitcoin would end up being worth a whole lot more then this could had been one way of redistributing wealth if Musk felt he didn't needed it himself.
Hail the God Emperor Elon! (Score:2)
Give me (and Elon) an effin break.
Elon musk also... (Score:1)
Invented the cure for cancer, but is under a non compete that prevents him from releasing it.
Bitcoin an environmental disaster (Score:2)
World currently burns more than 2% of total U.S. residential energy consumption on the childish pursuit of bitcoin "mining".
For what? A currency system with the worst privacy story imaginable?
Personally I couldn't care less who invented it. My view the world is better off without it.
Re: (Score:2)
Please compare to what the US banking & finance industry (including stock markets, brokerage houses, and the like) consume before complaining.
Do you think there isn't a market for bitcoin or bitcoin brokers don't exist? Both assumptions are of course false. What services that apply to traditional currency markets do not apply to bitcoin? If Bitcoin were to become the U.S. + world reserve currency overnight what aspect of Bitcoin specifically would be the source of increased efficiency vs. U.S. dollar? Not "wasting" money on printing presses?
I'd wager that crypto is more efficient.
I'd wager monkeys mashing keys on a keyboard are better at wagering than people guessing.
And that's not factoring in the whole point of crypro - getting the government out of money. There's a lot of value there.
This is a com
Automotive (Score:1)
Next Question (Score:2)
Has Elon Musk the cure for the common cold?
Can Elon Musk walk on water?
Was Elon Musks mother a virgin?
Has Elon Musk invented vacuum tube maglev vehicles?
Dear Editor David (Score:2)
Please stop asking questions in the subject line of your articles. I've seen at least 3 of them today, and the answer is always NO.
Re: (Score:2)
Of course the answer is always No. If it were yes the article would not have been written.
S.A. Tushi (Score:1)
SAToshi
South African Toshi
South African Tushi [urbandictionary.com]
This was educational (Score:3)
Jezus (Score:1)
Jezus made the Bitcoin.
obviously (Score:1)
time traveler (Score:1)
"Satoshi" probably hasn't even been born yet. He traveled back in time to generate wealth for himself in the future; His innovation was creating a new currency, as opposed to using the old compound interest trick -- also makes actually procuring the money easier, no banks to deal with, just needs to have his keys.
Only if You Also Believe . . . (Score:1)
Does he not have minions for that?
I own no bitcoins (Score:1)
Zodiac (Score:1)
That settles it (Score:2)
Clearly Musk did create Bitcoin.
Re: (Score:2)
fully breaking SHA-256 would require more energy than the Sun (Sol) has left.
Unless you got lucky with the guessing.
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