Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal revealed that he may have met the creator of Bitcoin (BTC) -4.04% the world’s first decentralized cryptocurrency, that just hit a new all-time high of $66,974 and turned into a $1 trillion asset class.
In Thiel’s opinion Nakamoto may have been in the meeting of E-Gold founders, that took place on the beach in the Caribbean Island of Anguilla in 2020.
E-Gold was a private digital cryptocurrency that was founded in 1996 to challenge central banks. The aim of the meeting was to make PayPal interoperable with E-Gold currency so it will “blow up all the central banks”. The digital currency based on gold, was in use until 2007 after its founders were indicted by the US Justice Department for a variety of reasons.
“My sort of theory on Satoshi’s identity was that Satoshi was on that beach in Anguilla” said Thiel to Bloomberg. (Business Insider, 2021)
Thiel thinks that E-Gold’s failure may have been a painful lesson for its founders.
“Bitcoin was the answer to E-Gold, and Satoshi learned that you had to be anonymous and you had to not have a company. […] Even a company, even a corporate form was too governmentally linked”. (Business Insider, 2021)
The meeting was attended by about 200 people, so it is not so obvious who is the creator or who are the creators of Bitcoin as Nakamoto could be also a group of people, but this gives some light on the identity of Bitcoin’s founder. Thiel emphasized that he has not made much effort to identify Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity because as he says, “if we knew who it was, the government would arrest him”. (Business Insider, 2021)
Coinbase (COIN) -4.67% is also in favour of Nakamoto staying anonymous. The largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States claims that the revealing Bitcoin founder’s identity would be a risk for the trading platform, as it could lead to price deterioration of Bitcoin.
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*Stock percentage taken on 22.10.2021 at 11:15.
*Lee, Isabelle (22. October 2021). Business Insider: Peter Thiel thinks he may have met Satoshi Nakamoto and says he knows where he’d look for the mysterious bitcoin creator. Last viewed on 22.10.2021 on https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/peter-thiel-satoshi-nakamoto-bitcoin-creator-anguilla-btc-egold-coinbase-2021-10.
