A new event in the realm of cryptocurrencies has drawn a lot of attention: Billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel has said that he might have met the person or group who created Bitcoin under the alias Satoshi Nakamoto.
Thiel claims that they met 23 years ago in Anguilla at a symposium on financial cryptography.
This information was revealed at the same time as Thiel's friend Balaji Srinivasan predicted Bitcoin may reach a $1 million valuation.
It is conceivable that Thiel met Satoshi given his connections at the time, which included Elon Musk, the PayPal Mafia, the creators of E-Gold, Srinivasan, and Vitalik Buterin.
Yet, it's unclear how closely they are connected.
Investigating Thiel's Possible Satoshi Connection
Thiel reflected, "In February 2000, I met them in Anguilla on the sand. Initiating a revolution against central banks was what we were doing. We aimed to overturn all central banks and integrate PayPal with E-Gold."
When the US Justice Department shut down the project and detained the project's founders for unregistered money transmission in 2007, E-Gold came to an end. For more than another seven years, E-effects Gold's and forfeitures lingered.
Nakamoto's concept for Bitcoin may have found plenty of inspiration at the Financial Cryptography conference, a long-running gathering of cypherpunks.
Researchers at the conference delivered papers titled "Efficient Electronic Cash with Limited Privacy" and "Electronic Cash - Technology Will Denationalize Money."
Thiel asserts that Satoshi must have drawn inspiration from E-Cash for ideas like eschewing formal hierarchies and using the MIT's Open Source License for Bitcoin.
Near To Source: PayPal Mafia
Thiel was a part of the "PayPal Mafia," a group of FinTech start-up founders who amassed substantial riches through dot-com firms and IPOs, that emerged in the early 2000s.
Elon Musk, the founder of X.com and an early proponent of Bitcoin and Dogecoin, and Balaji Srinivasan, a former Coinbase CTO and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, were prominent figures (a16z).
Recently, Srinivasan gained headlines for betting that Bitcoin will hit $1 million because of possible American hyperinflation, though some have questioned whether this is really a publicity ploy.
Thiel and longtime friend Srinivasan have similar views on seasteading and the American banking system.
Both claim that in order to be unregulated, bitcoin needs a sovereign state.
Only days before its disastrous bank run, Thiel's Founders Fund cleverly transferred billions of assets from SVB in an effort to avert the calamity.
While some criticize Thiel's claims, others draw attention to allegations that he sold his Bitcoin holdings.
Thiel undoubtedly contributed to the early Financial Cryptography community, regardless of his current involvement in cryptocurrencies, and he still has strong opinions about banks.
Thiel publicly expressed his mistrust of the US dollar at the 2022 Bitcoin Miami conference by tearing up $100 bills and criticizing the banking system.