Did Paypal’s Peter Thiel just crack the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto?

Thiel’s convinced he met Nakamoto, the elusive Bitcoin founder, on ‘the beach in Anguilla’ in February 2000, where a set of 200 crypto pioneers had once brainstormed.

Satoshi Nakamoto is one of the biggest mysteries in the crypto universe. The pseudonym was used by the individual or group of individuals who first authored the Bitcoin white paper nearly a decade ago, and created and deployed Bitcoin’s original reference implementation. Nakamoto was credited with devising the first blockchain database and was actively involved in the development of Bitcoin until 2010.

But the identity of the figure remains shrouded in mystery. Now Peter Thiel, PayPal Co-Founder and billionaire venture capitalist, believes that he may hold a crucial clue for determining the identity of the mysterious developer.

Once upon a time in Anguilla

Thiel believes that Nakamoto may have been present in person in an early meeting of E-Gold founders in February 2000. The meeting was attended by 200 people at a beach in Anguilla.

The E-gold movement was aiming to build a new system of currencies that would challenge the primacy of central banks over monetary policies. It was one of the first instances of decentralised finance being discussed. E-Gold, the digital gold currency, went belly up in 2007 after several of its founders were indicted by the US Justice Department.

“I met them (E-Gold founders) on the beach in Anguilla in February of 2000,” Thiel said during a cryptocurrency conference in Miami on October 20. “We were beginning the revolution against the central banks on the beach in Anguilla. We were going to make PayPal interoperable with E-Gold and blow up all the central banks.”

Thiel’s theory

Thiel theorises that not only was Nakamoto on that beach during the meeting, but the collapse of E-Gold may have prompted Nakamoto to remain anonymous while they developed the world’s first cryptocurrency.

“My sort of theory on Satoshi’s identity was that Satoshi was on that beach in Anguilla,” he added. “Bitcoin was the answer to E-Gold, and Satoshi learned that you had to be anonymous and you had to not have a company,” Thiel said.

Bitcoin has recently smashed all previous records , with cryptocurrency bulls hoping to see the world’s largest cryptocurrency cross $100,000 to 1 BTC before the end of the year.

Though a bug on Binance’s US exchange caused prices to crash by 87 percent, the prices of cryptocurrency still deflated from its new all-time high of over $67,000 by 4.35 percent.

Bitcoin’s legality in India still remains in a grey area but that fact has not stopped Indian investors from quickly betting their earnings on the volatile asset class. With a 386 percent return over the last year, it is not hard to see why the cryptocurrency has so many takers.

Also read: A timeline of Bitcoin’s journey from 2008 to 2021

(Edited by : Shoma Bhattacharjee )