So who is it?
It is one of the greatest mysteries of our time, a mystery that torments even the finest detectives.
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator or the creators, of bitcoin, the popular cryptocurrency at the origin of the Big Bang of traditional finance for almost 13 years?
Many people have claimed in the past to have discovered the identity of Satoshi Nakamato only to finally admit defeat.
Elon Musk, the whimsical CEO of Tesla (TSLA) and SpaceX has once again revived the rumors and reactivated all the budding detectives on the internet.
The billionaire thus posted on his Twitter account on Wednesday a meme from a post posted on the Medium site in November 2017.
This meme shows that the pseudonym 'Satoshi Nakamoto' is an assemblage of letters from the names of four electronic companies: Samsung, Toshiba, Nakamichi and Motorola.
Musk doesn't add any words or say what message he wants to get across. We are therefore left to speculate.
Four Companies
The pseudonym was probably chosen by someone or a group of people who wanted to completely cover their tracks. A person or a group of people who probably does not want to be found or Satoshi Nakamoto was created by the four companies. In short, Musk's tweet revives all conspiracy theories
The post addressed to its more than 77.2 million followers has already been liked more than 480,000 times at the time of writing.
In the process, Musk provoked comments from his fans as well as from the headliners of the crypto space. Musk, it must be emphasized, is one of the champions of crypto. He is particularly fond of meme coin dogecoin, which Tesla accepts as payment for its merch. Tesla also held $1.99 billion worth of bitcoin on its balance sheet as of Dec. 31.
"If you look hard enough, you will see Satoshi Nakamoto everywhere," commented billionaire Michael Saylor, a bitcoin investor
"woa the creator of bitcoin is half Japanese, a quarter Korean and a quarter American," exclaimed Billy Markus, the creator of dogecoin.
Other comments wondered if Musk was Satoshi Nakamoto. He thus revealed his identity via this tweet.
"Imagine @elonmusk just comes out and says he's Satoshi..."
"Do you have something to tell us?" wrote another user.
Fintech BlockFi was one of those who ironically wondered if the billionaire was not the famous Satoshi Nakamoto.
"Could it be??" the company tweeted with the white paper on the creation of bitcoin with the name Satoshi Nakamoto at the top and an email address with the first name "elon."
Is It Musk?
Musk has previously denied that he was the creator of bitcoin.
"Not true. A friend sent me part of a BTC a few years, but I don't know where it is," the billionaire tweeted in 2017.
Musk, however, has never said a word about another theory that he is friends and knows the real Nakamato. This theory is often accompanied by this photo, which was again posted by a user who was commenting on his last tweet.
"Elon is this you and Satoshi Nakamoto?" asked the user.
This old photo was included in Musk's biography whose title is "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future" by Ashlee Vance. The picture shows Musk in the early ’90s at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. The other person in the photograph is likely Navaid Farooq, one of Musk’s college friends, according to the book.
While waiting for the answer, we have to admit that Musk seems obsessed with the identity of the founder(s) of bitcoin. Last year, the richest man in the world accused Nick Szabo, the computer scientist behind the smart contracts that are at the heart of decentralized finance (DeFi).
Szabo's work also laid the foundations of cryptocurrencies, agree industry players. But he denied in 2017 being the elusive Satoshi Nakamoto.
"Well, you can look at the evolution of ideas before the launch of bitcoin and see who wrote about those ideas,” Musk told artificial intelligence researcher Lex Fridman on December 28.
He added that: “It seems as though Nick Szabo is probably, more than anyone else, responsible for the evolution of those ideas.”
People have been trying to identify who Satoshi Nakamoto is since publication of the paper “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” on a cryptography mailing list in 2008. While several people have claimed to be Nakamoto, this person or persons’ identity is still a mystery.
Several other people have been accused of being Nakamoto or indicated that they were Nakamoto but so far no irrefutable proof has been provided.
