Elon eye on bitcoin-creator mystery

Elon Musk has weighed in with his thoughts on the real identity of the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous person or group credited with creating bitcoin.

During his appearance Tuesday on the “Lex Fridman Podcast,” the host asked Musk whether it was a “feature or a bug” that bitcoin’s creator has never publicly come forward, prompting Musk to provide his theory on the situation.

A prominent cryptocurrency advocate, Musk argued that US computer scientist Nick Szabo is most “responsible” for bitcoin’s development.

However, he stopped short of naming Szabo as the cryptocurrency’s creator.

“You can look at the evolution of ideas before the launch of bitcoin and see who wrote about those ideas,” Musk said.

“Obviously, I don’t know who created bitcoin for practical purposes, but the evolution of ideas is pretty clear before that. It seems as though Nick Szabo is probably, more than anybody else, responsible for the evolution of those ideas.”

“He claims not to be Nakamoto, but that’s neither here nor there. He seems to be the one more responsible for the ideas behind bitcoin than anyone else,” Musk said.

Szabo has long been viewed as a potential candidate for Nakamoto. The digital cryptographer created a bitcoin predecessor called “bit gold” in the late 1990s.

In 2014, a team of UKbased linguistics researchers compared a famous bitcoin white paper attributed to Nakamoto to the works of 11 people suspected of being its creator. The researchers concluded Szabo was the most likely author.

Szabo has consistently denied being bitcoin’s creator, including in a 2014 tweet in which he wrote he was “Not Satoshi, but thank you.”