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Highly specific commonalities between Satoshi Nakamoto and PayPal co-founder Elon Musk

Sahil Gupta
Coinmonks

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“It was a way of transferring money between one entity and another entity by specifying a unique identifier, which in this case was an email address.” -Musk on PayPal in 2005, 7:15 https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1151875188973577

Overview

  • Common technical ability
  • Common linguistic quirks
  • Common software style
  • Common physical location and time availability
  • Common motivating philosophy

… all true simultaneously.

Ability to write production-grade software in C++ language

Kaminsky ticked off the skills Nakamoto would need to pull it off. “He’s a world-class programmer, with a deep understanding of the C++ programming language,” he said. “He understands economics, cryptography, and peer-to-peer networking.”
- https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/10/the-crypto-currency

In early 90s, I wrote a multitasker for PCs that spoofed the CPU & CD-ROM to act in parallel, so could read video continuously while player sprite moved smoothly. Required C++, assembly & direct flipping of CPU registers. That company’s name was Rocket Science. Fate loves irony.
- https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1005643673353064448

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Code described by others as ‘monolithic’

Yeah. 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. The separation between different parts of Bitcoin Core has improved drastically over the years.
- https://hackernoon.com/matt-corallo-on-how-bitcoin-works-25a46b547359

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 hunks of code that could go berserk for mysterious reasons.
- https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9356850-they-took-one-look-at-zip2-s-code-and-began-rewriting

Location in Van Nuys, Los Angeles

This is not a TOR exit node which implies that this is the IP address used by Satoshi on 2009–01–10 and he was in Van Nuys on this day.
- https://whoissatoshi.wordpress.com/2016/02/20/satoshi-in-california/

The jet is registered to a subsidiary of SpaceX called Falcon Landing, named for its reusable rocket, Federal Aviation Administration records show… Many of the flights took off from or landed at LA’s Van Nuys airport, a short drive from the tony neighbourhood of Bel Air where Musk owns five separate mansions.
- https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/management/musks-2018-150000-miles-of-private-jet-travel-in-excruciating-year-20190130-h1an97

A Bitcoin developer feeling like “a full-time employee”

Hanyecz said that even though his work on bitcoin was a side project he worked on for free, Nakamoto treated him as if he were a full-time employee. “He’d say, ‘Hey, the west side’s down,’ or ‘We have these bugs — we need to fix this.’
- https://www.businessinsider.com/satoshi-nakamoto-was-weird-and-bossy-says-bitcoin-developer-2018-5

He calls himself a “nano-manager,” works about 100 hours a week and still runs the auto maker largely as he did before it sold the first Tesla Roadster in 2008.
- https://www.wsj.com/articles/electric-car-pioneer-elon-musk-charges-head-on-at-detroit-1421033527

Having time to write Bitcoin in 2007

I believe I’ve worked through all those little details over the last year and a half while coding it, and there were a lot of them.
- Satoshi on 2008–11–17 https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/15/#selection-15.0-15.10

I spend about 2 to 3 days a month on Tesla-related business, and almost all the rest of the time is on SpaceX.
- Musk in 2007
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqoLRlpROG8&t=1233s

“order of magnitude”

I thought it would be impractical if the block chain, bitcoin addresses, disk space and bandwidth requirements were all an order of magnitude bigger.

RSA can do both, but I didn’t use it because it’s an order of magnitude bigger and would have been impractical.

I know for competitive reasons the inclination is to keep it to yourself, but it could get an order of magnitude more use if anyone could give proxy access to their country just by putting the software on a server.

Setting up the buffer takes an order of magnitude longer than the actual hashing if you’re only hashing one or two blocks like we do.

The new efficient single-pass algorithm is orders of magnitude quicker.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fsatoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org%2Fposts%2Fbitcointalk+%22order+of+magnitude%22

Global economy of $100T is overwhelmingly fossil fuel based, so IMF estimate of $5T or 5% for carbon subsidy is def right order of magnitude

Wouldn’t read too much into this. Likely to be fewer F9/FH flights, but possibly an order of magnitude more than these numbers in Starship flights.

This engine needs to be 10X lower cost. Order of magnitude change is good reason for a new name.

Retrofits will start when our software is able to take meaningful advantage of the Tesla FSD computer, which is an order of magnitude more capable.

This is without the Tesla NN computer. Per my public comments, that will give the car an extra order of magnitude.

Tesla traction control is an order of magnitude more precise than gas/diesel.

Directionally correct, but Zenit is an order of magnitude smaller than Starship system & doesn’t come back & land

Approx min payload to Mars to nearest order of magnitude, so at $100k/ton, cost would be $100B

CDC numbers are almost an order of magnitude lower between high fidelity data (onset date known) and “presumed positive”.

https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Aelonmusk%20order%20of%20magnitude&src=typed_query&f=top

“bloody”

Writing a description for this thing for general audiences is bloody hard.
- https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/threads/79/?view=satoshi

Bloody hell, I’m going to have to write a blog. Can’t fit this into tweets.
- https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/943887056492564480

“porn guys” “pedo guy”

Bitcoin would be convenient for people who don’t have a credit card or don’t want to use the cards they have, either don’t want the spouse to see it on the bill or don’t trust giving their number to “porn guys”, or afraid of recurring billing.
- https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/460/#selection-33.0-33.243

Sorry pedo guy, you really did ask for it.
- https://time.com/5339219/elon-musk-diver-thai-soccer-team-pedo/

Writing with two spaces after a period

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=383.msg3295#msg3295

https://i.insider.com/546397d1ecad044756a12570

Specific knowledge of the Visa credit card network

Visa processed 37 billion transactions in FY2008, or an average of 100 million transactions per day.
- https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/#selection-85.208-85.308

PayPal is forced to pay almost 2% to VISA/MasterCard for a credit card transfer plus pay for any fraud or chargebacks, which adds about 1%, all things considered.
- https://www.gawker.com/230076/an-alternate-history-according-to-elon-musk

Attitude to public domain graphics

It’ll be a lot simpler if authors could make their graphics public domain.
- https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/500/

SpaceX Photos Are Now Available Under a Creative Commons License. Just changed them to full public domain
- https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/579210902932574209

The original vision of PayPal

Many people don’t know this but the mission of PayPal was to create a global currency that was independent of interference by these corrupt cartels of banks and governments that were debasing their currencies. And we succeeded building something economically very powerful, enabled many small businesses, we’re super proud of it, but we never achieved the mission.
- Luke Nosek, Co-Founder of PayPal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOeOzhOxeMU&t=40s

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Sahil Gupta
Coinmonks

Written by Sahil Gupta

307 Followers
Writer for

spase.io, bigcircusmodel.org