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.
There's no way, even if it was a single-digit number of people team that they would remain silent. If it was just Elon/Thiel I could perhaps believe it.
Also keep in mind that there were some very desperate years for Elon where his companies were extremely close to bankruptcy, wouldn't he have tapped into that bitcoin if he had access to it?
That's not how business works. You borrow, then borrow some more, and focus on having a long term plan to cover the interest, so you don't upset the banks or end up broke again.
Doesn't Elon sell Bitcoin whenever he needs a few hundred million these days?
The fact that we don't understand how someone could've come up with something like PayPal or Bitcoin might be exactly why Elon and Peter are the richest people on the planet.
> There's no way, even if it was a single-digit number of people team that they would remain silent.
JPMorgan moves $10 trillion a day. Would you sleep at night knowing you publicly admitted being involved in a project whose only mission is to bring them down?