Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, said at a conference in Miami that he may have met Satoshi Nakamoto, known as the inventor of Bitcoin, on a beach on a Caribbean island in February 2000.
Thiel met the founders of E-Gold that day, who failed in an attempt to create a gold-backed digital currency through a company that was shut down by the US government for “illegal money transfer.”
Thiel said the following on the subject.
“My theory about Satoshi’s identity was that Satoshi was on that beach in Anguilla.
In February 2000, I met the founders of E-Gold on the coast of Anguilla. We were starting a revolution on the coast against central banks. We were going to make PayPal interoperable with E-Gold and blow up all the central banks.”
Thiel suggests that Nakamoto may have been one of the 200 attendees at this meeting:
“Bitcoin was E-Gold’s answer. Satoshi learned that you must be anonymous and not have a company. A company, even a corporate form, was highly linked to the government.”
The 20-24 February 2000 conference was the fourth fourth conference on Financial Cryptography. This international meeting was launched as a gathering of “cryptographers, security experts, hackers, lawyers, bankers and journalists” at the first conference on 24-28 February 1997.
The first conference attendees included giants such as the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Citibank, and AT&T Laboratories.
