Sleeping beauty Bitcoin wallets wake up after 14 years to the tune of $2B

Seriously though, what are the odds that someone has been quietly spending 10s/100s of millions in cloud compute to brute force the keys for old wallets?

Even if that were possible, you could brute force one wallet. Not eight wallets closely related to each other.

Or some other flaw found in a wallet’s key generation?

Kinda like what happened here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6195493

(Or exactly that but nobody tried to attack this again with moar power?)

In 2000, according to Peter Thiel, he met with the E-Gold team in Anguilla.

Around 2001, Elon and Peter were at PayPal, and they had plans to build a similar digital currency.

In 2002, PayPal was sold, and that pretty much ended the digital currency plan. Instead, PayPal let users link their bank accounts and cards to make payments. This created a bigger dependency on banks.

By 2004, there were over a million E‑Gold accounts. Banks weren’t happy about it. Meanwhile, Elon and Peter understood exactly how much potential this new kind of digital currency had.

In 2007, the banks took the founders of E-Gold to court for running an unlicensed money‑transmitting business. That same year, the E-Gold engineers were out of work.

Bitcoin was invented in 2008, the same year Elon was broke and busy trying to save both SpaceX and Tesla from going bankrupt.

His theory is that Elon and Peter hired the smartest engineers from the E-Gold team and asked them to build blockchain so they could create their own version of E-Gold. The team worked on Bitcoin from 2007 to 2010 under the alias of Nakamoto.

> In 2002, PayPal was sold, and that pretty much ended the digital currency plan. Instead, PayPal let users link their bank accounts and cards to make payments. This created a bigger dependency on banks.

This doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

Except PayPal wasn't invented by Elon or Peter. It was Elon's company's plan to build the digital bank but they were failing quite spectacularly at it.

They merged with Confinity who'd already built PayPal, had a working prototype, etc.

Elon lasted four months as CEO of PayPal, trying to convert it from Java to ASP until the Board didn't ask him to resign, but fired him, the morning he left on his honeymoon after getting married.

PayPal is a complete red herring there. Elon had no participation in ideas on digital currency there.