Peter Thiel revealed he may know where to look forbitcoin 's mysterious founder,Satoshi Nakamoto .- "My sort of theory on Satoshi's identity was that Satoshi was on that beach in Anguilla," Thiel said.
- The billionaire was speaking at a Miami conference Wednesday, according to $4.
Billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel on Wednesday revealed he may know where to look for $4's mysterious founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, whose brainchild has now burgeoned into a $1 trillion dollar asset class.
His theory stems from meeting the founders of E-Gold, a private digital currency founded in 1996 that is now obsolete after being $4 by the US Justice Department in April 2007.
Thiel told a Miami $4 audience that he met them on a beach in the Caribbean island of Anguilla in February 2000, according to $4. That's when they discussed making PayPal interoperable with E-Gold to "blow up all the central banks."
"My sort of theory on Satoshi's identity was that Satoshi was on that beach in Anguilla," he said, as reported by $4.
In fact, Thiel - the co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund - said Nakamoto may have been one of the roughly 200 people on the beach at that time.
The self-described libertarian also said Nakamoto may have learned from the mistakes of E-Gold, given how he laid out bitcoin's use cases in his white paper entitled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System."
Nakamoto - who could be a person or a group of people - published the paper, which outlined the principles of a cryptographically secured and decentralized peer-to-peer digital payment system, around Halloween in 2008 and was never heard from again.
"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. "Even a company, even a corporate form was too governmentally linked."
The billionaire did clarify that he has not put much effort into finding out the real identity of bitcoin's founder - contrary to some in the cryptocurrency space. The secrecy of the founder's identity has long been a source of speculation for the community with several $4 over the years that have somewhat disrupted the lives of private individuals.
Not everyone is in favor of Nakamoto coming forward, however. $4, the largest
The company also said it could be negatively impacted if Nakamoto transferred his bitcoins - of which he is $4. The value of those coins, as of publishing, stands at around $65 billion.
Thiel, it seems, also prefers not to know the founder of the world's largest digital asset.
"If we knew who it was, the government would arrest him," Thiel said.