The billionaire compared the current money system to an old COBOL in batch mode.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed the identity of the person he believes deserves the most credit for creating and developing Bitcoin on Lex Fridman’s podcast on Tuesday, December 28, the NY Post reported. The host prompted Musk to provide his theory on the situation by asking if it was a “feature or a bug” that Bitcoin’s creator was never truly identified.
Nick Szabo deserves the most credit
Musk, a prominent cryptocurrency advocate, told Fridman computer scientist Nick Szabo was most “responsible” for the flagship crypto’s development. While he didn’t name him as the real Satoshi Nakamoto, he said:
You can look at the evolution of ideas before the launch of bitcoin and see who wrote about those ideas. Obviously, I don’t know who created bitcoin for practical purposes, but the evolution of ideas is pretty clear before that. It seems as though Nick Szabo is probably, more than anybody else, responsible for the evolution of those ideas. He claims not to be Nakamoto but that’s neither here nor there. He seems to be the one more responsible for the ideas behind bitcoin than anyone else.
Szabo created the predecessor of Bitcoin
In the late 1990s, Szabo created a Bitcoin predecessor called “bit gold”. A few years later, a team of linguistics researchers in the UK compared the Bitcoin whitepaper to the works of some people viewed as potential candidates for Nakamoto, concluding he was most likely Szabo. For his part, the computer scientist has always denied being Bitcoin’s creator.
Musk: I’m not Satoshi
Many people have been tabbed as potential candidates, including Musk himself, who also denies it. During the podcast interview, he assured the host he wasn’t Satoshi, but if he were, he would admit it.
Putting a Dogecoin on the moon
When asked whether he would put a Dogecoin on the moon, Musk didn’t deny it. With regard to his intentions to populate Mars, he said the Red Planet needed a different currency because you ‘couldn’t synchronize speed of light’. It would be ‘some localized thing, not crypto. The future should be up to the Martians.’ He expressed disdain for the current state of the money system:
Right now, the money system is…a bunch of heterogenous mainframes running an old COBOL* in batch mode.
*COBOL stands for Common Business Oriented Language. It is imperative, procedural, and object-oriented. A compiler is a computer program that takes other computer programs written in a high-level (source) language and coverts them into another program, machine code, which the computer can understand.
