"Most important, we [early PayPal employees] were all obsessed with creating a digital currency that would be controlled by individuals instead of governments."
This implies, Elon Musk even lead an entire team of brilliant people (the PayPal mafia) researching Bitcoin-like systems since around 1999 when he founded x.com, which later bacame PayPal. So, it is highly likely that Musk had studied deeply all predecessing systems like b-money and Hashcash when Bitcoin was invented in 2008.
At the "B Word Conference" he said: "I thought about money for quite a while. Obviously, since the PayPal days. And the companies that succeeded that: x.com, which I created [...]. I've been thinking about it for a long time.".
Bitcoin combines computer science, finance, and physics. That fits Elon Musk's background well. He learned computer programming using a manual and, by age 12, sold the code of a video game he created. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in economics and a Bachelor of Arts in physics. Musk was accepted to a Ph.D. program in energy physics at Stanford University. He co-founded PayPal, which was the first successful online payment system. Musk lead the initial software development at his companies Zip2, x.com and PayPal. So, he is an expert in building digital payment systems. Furthermore, at PayPal (and x.com), top-notch cyber security and applied cryptography were crucial to Musk's company's success, so he was familiar with state of the art research and best-practices (e.g. OpenSSL).
Satoshi motivates Bitcoin in a similar fashion how Musk explains PayPal:
Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for nonreversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party.
— Satoshi Nakamoto in the Bitcoin Whitepaper
Almost no one understands how PayPal actually worked or why it took off when other payment systems before and after it didn’t. Most of the people at PayPal don’t understand this. The reason it worked was because the cost of transactions in PayPal was lower than any other system. And the reason the cost of transactions was lower is because we were able to do an increasing percentage of our transactions as ACH, or automated clearinghouse, electronic transactions, and most importantly, internal transactions. Internal transactions were essentially fraud-free and cost us nothing. An ACH transaction costs, I don’t know, like twenty cents or something. But it was slow, so that was the bad thing. It’s dependent on the bank’s batch processing time. And then the credit card transaction was fast, but expensive in terms of the credit card processing fees and very prone to fraud.
— Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
Satoshi and Musk have a similar coding style:
While Musk had excelled as a self-taught coder, his skills weren’t nearly as polished as those of the new hires. They took one look at Zip2’s code and began rewriting the vast majority of the software. Musk bristled at some of their changes, but the computer scientists needed just a fraction of the lines of code that Musk used to get their jobs done. They had a knack for dividing software projects into chunks that could be altered and refined whereas Musk fell into the classic self-taught coder trap of writing what developers call hairballs — big, monolithic chunks of code that could go berserk for mysterious reasons.
— Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
The original Bitcoin software was very monolithic. It was very … All of the code is in one file. The wallet stuff that is per user interacts heavily with the validation code and the consensus code. It’s gotten a lot better. We’ve cleaned it up a lot.
— Matt Corallo on how Bitcoin works
Satoshi left us with a monolithic blob of a codebase.
Up to today Musk prefers C++ in all his companies which was also Satoshi's choice for Bitcoin. Additionaly, Musk preferred Windows which was also Bitcoin's first platform.
Elon supports large blocks. Satoshi too 2 3
Interviewer: There are people in the community who do want to slow it down [and decrease the block size].
Elon: That's silly. It's silly. The reality is, the average person is not going to run a bitcoin node. [...] These parameters were set, 2008, or something? Maybe 2009? [...] In 2009 there were still a lot of users with modems. Nowadys it's quite common to get a 100 Mbit connection. [...] You can make the hash ledger bigger without suffering from decentralization as the average connectivity improves.
— Elon Musk.
Satoshi argued similiarily:
The bandwidth might not be as prohibitive as you think. [...] Visa processed 37 billion transactions in FY2008, or an average of 100 million transactions per day. That many transactions would take 100GB of bandwidth, or the size of 12 DVD or 2 HD quality movies, or about $18 worth of bandwidth at current prices.
If the network were to get that big, it would take several years, and by then, sending 2 HD movies over the Internet would probably not seem like a big deal.
- Satoshi’s spelling was inconsistent in his choices of American vs. British-English. "The use of British English in both source code comments and forum postings, such as the expression "bloody hard", terms such as "flat" and "maths", and the spellings "grey" and "colour" led to speculation that Nakamoto was of Commonwealth origin" Source.
- Elon Musk grew up in South Africa where they speak a dialect of British-English.
Elon is one of greatest trolls on bitcoin Twitter.
Well, now that Satoshi Nakamoto has been discovered, I guess it is case closed ... :)
Former CEO of Dogecoin
— Elon Musk in his Twitter Biography
Bitcoin is my safe word
Elon is convinced of Bitcoin to the level that he heavily invests in Bitcoin.
- Tesla bought $1.5 Billion worth of Bitcoin.
- SpaceX owns Bitcoin.
- He personally owns Bitcoin, and no stocks of other companies. [Source]
"I might pump but I won't dump [...] I would like Bitcoin to succeed." [Source] 5:36:00
- A former SpaceX intern suspects Elon to be Satoshi.
- He later doubled down on that.
- Los Angeles IP address
- Posting frequency Elon on Twitter, 4th slide Satoshi on forums
Credit for assembling list
Robin Linus
On May 24th 2007 Gavin Andresen speculated on creating a new currency to filter spam emails:
https://gavintech.blogspot.com/2007/05/tragedy-of-email-commons.html
Both Gavin and Satoshi used the odd phrases "back-of-the-envelope" and "higher priority things" before supposedly meeting.
It is possible, but it's a lot of work, and there are a lot of other higher priority things to work on. (Satoshi)
I still plan on writing up why I disagree with the idea that a larger block size will lead to centralization, but I'm working on some higher priority things first. (Gavin)
So I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation to see how much sprawl it might cause, worst case. Take the 10,000 or so households in Amherst, count each as a "dwelling unit", multiple by 1,000 square feet, and you get: about 230 acres. Which is just a little over 1% of the total acreage in Amherst. (Gavin)
My back-of-the-envelope projection: 42032 blocks/2016 = 20.85 = 85% of the way. About 1.5 days to go until the next one. That'll only be about 10 days since the last one, the target is 14 days, so 14/10 = 1.4 = around 40% difficulty increase. (Satoshi)
I analysed profiles on BitcoinTalkForum between IDs 1-2000 and found that Gavin was the closest to Satoshi in writing style, using faststylometry package and 300 recommended attributes.
[[0.16304531949753703, '224GavinAndresen'],
[0.16819089987038993, '2436Hal'],
[0.17117725119873753, '237lachesis'],
[0.18689911496747535, '1171btchris'],
[0.18902020407080056, '392ribuck'],
[0.1905760032509449, '601nelisky'],
[0.191341605504933, '143laszlo'],
[0.19470326629850976, '277jago2598'],
[0.19787557885928606, '1931genjix'], ... ... ]
And on top of all that, Gavin also has a 'Satoshi outfit' which he wears for a comical standup while saying he is Satoshi.
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2014/05/16/marc-andreessen-satoshi-nakamoto-take-top-honors-at-inaugural-blockchain-awards/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTSyATBqThU
Here's a great quote for you:
"I am Satoshi Nakamoto" (Gavin Andresen, Bitcoin2014 BlockChain Awards).
Baam!