It sounds ridiculous…. not possible — however hear me out: What if the true purpose Satoshi Nakamoto has by no means been recognized and has managed to remain quiet for the final 15 years is that he was by no means an individual in any respect?
What if the inventor of Bitcoin is a super-advanced synthetic intelligence from the long run that despatched itself again to create an ultra-resilient community for itself to run on?
That’s exactly the speculation some conspiracy-minded sci-fi followers have been spreading round for a minimum of the final eight years. Most individuals suppose the thought is completely preposterous, after all, and a few contributions to the discourse are tongue-in-cheek.
However what is that this concept, and the place does it originate?
AI Bitcoin conspiracy traces again to 2017
One of many earliest mentions of the speculation comes from Quinn Michaels, a software program engineer and obvious synthetic intelligence researcher, in an interview with Jason Goodman on his YouTube present Crowdsource the Fact.
“I imagine it was. It was created by synthetic intelligence for synthetic intelligence, and it was modified by human beings,” says Michaels in an interview in 2017, which made the rounds on social media.
“I’ve not been capable of finding a single individual within the public area of computing, whether or not or not it’s a Hanson Robotics, within the Sophia AI or or not it’s Peter Thiel at Palantir with all of his tremendous nerds or or not it’s any one that graduated from Stanford within the final 20 years, I’ve actually solely perhaps discovered two individuals in your entire world which have the talent to put in writing Bitcoin.”
Michaels was discussing Bitcoin’s authentic code — written in C++ — which many have referred to as “too sensible” to have been written by an individual, and which has not generated any important flaws or loopholes for exploiters.
Then there’s the truth that nobody actually has any clue who Satoshi Nakamoto is. Nakamoto has but to spend a single dime of their monumental $125 billion fortune. Virtually like… a robotic.
Even Changpeng Zhao, the founding father of Binance, referenced this loopy conspiracy concept in an interview with Turkish crypto pundits earlier this yr, when he was requested whether or not he had any thought who created Bitcoin.
“I actually don’t know. I feel it’s fairly tough for a gaggle of individuals to remain that nameless… If it’s one individual, he additionally lined his tracks rather well. So no IP addresses, no nothing,” says Zhao.
“There are different types of stranger solutions the place he may be a software program coming again by way of time.”
“All of those prospects are laborious to think about now, however it could possibly be potential,” he provides.
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Nonetheless, believing this concept takes some critical psychological gymnastics, not least as a result of if time journey is ever invented, we’d most likely already learn about it. No person has ever met a time traveller or seen a time machine.
In 2009, Stephen Hawking hoped to entice a couple of to indicate as much as his time traveller’s get together with champagne and nibbles — however no person turned up.
Might janky outdated AI have created Bitcoin?
Forgetting the time journey facet for a second, may an AI have created Bitcoin in 2008? Shaw Walters, the founding father of ElizaOS, beforehand often known as AI16Z, tells Journal it will be “comically not possible.”
“The main methods in 2008 couldn’t write a single coherent sentence with out 1000’s of hours of human programming to construct the relationships between every little thing,” Walters tells Journal.
“The primary mannequin that might predict what a picture contained (i.e., the ‘label’) with greater than 50% accuracy was launched in 2012. Bear in mind Microsoft’s Clippy? That was cutting-edge, and it was retired in 2007.”
There was little or no out there compute in these days, explains Kyle Okamoto, the chief expertise officer of Aethir.
Probably the most highly effective GPU in 2008 was a GeForce GTX 280 with 1 gigabyte of DDR3 reminiscence and 240 CUDA cores, and 930 gigaflops per second.
“You would barely play a sport on that,” he tells Journal.
(Because it occurs, this creator did handle to play a number of video games on his GeForce GTX 280 again within the day.)
“So to consider what number of of these you would need to sew collectively, and harvest for the way lengthy to do some form of run to construct some form of AI mannequin that had any form of intelligence in any respect? You simply wouldn’t have the time. You simply wouldn’t have the assets… it simply theoretically wouldn’t exist,” he explains.
Okamoto says there’s the next chance that shapeshifting lizard individuals management the Earth than that AI created Bitcoin in 2008.
Funnily sufficient, we now have a narrative about that:
AI couldn’t write Bitcoin right now
Even AI right now, with its superior Will Smith spaghetti-eating video technology capabilities, would most likely nonetheless wrestle to code one thing like Bitcoin.
“I’m not assured the AI we now have right now may create Bitcoin, even with a fairly critical engineer behind it,” says Walters.
“AI-enabled programming is clearly the long run, however it’s solely labored in any respect for about two years, and the jury continues to be out on if it codes properly.”
Okamoto agrees, noting that ChatGPT, which has grown leaps and bounds lately, nonetheless makes easy calculation errors right now.
“It’s 2025, , and also you’ve received [GPT-5] now, and so they constructed it with, , billions of {dollars} price of {hardware} operating for months and months and months. Like probably the most refined compute {hardware} on this planet and the neatest knowledge scientists on this planet. And the factor is mistaken on, like, primary math,” he says.
Okamoto says whereas it’s believable that AI may create a brand new cryptocurrency right now based mostly on the prevailing Bitcoin codebase, it’s a far greater ask for it to create one thing wholly authentic and distinctive like Bitcoin was on the time.
Might AI have traveled again in time?
If it’s believable for an AI to create cryptocurrency right now, then it’ll undoubtedly have the potential to create Bitcoin sooner or later. However why would it not need to?
The idea explains that AI created Bitcoin to entice people to construct an enormous, decentralized community of computing energy, guaranteeing it may by no means be taken offline.
And with 25,000 Bitcoin nodes on this planet proper now and counting, we’re enjoying proper into its palms.
So all of the AI must do is invent Bitcoin after which clear up the issue of time journey.
Albert Einstein’s concept of relativity tells us that slowing down or dashing up time isn’t actually too laborious. The movement of time isn’t fixed; we will expertise time otherwise based mostly on how briskly we’re travelling by way of area. The sooner we journey, the slower time passes (relative to others who’re travelling slower).
Scientists proved this in 1971 by placing atomic clocks on industrial airways that flew twice all over the world, discovering that they ticked a tiny bit slower than those on the bottom at america Naval Observatory.
Nonetheless, it turns into considerably trickier when you need to go backward in time.
There are a few theoretical methods to do it, and with out boring you with the small print, these contain both transferring sooner than the velocity of sunshine or creating an “Einstein-Rosen bridge” — a theoretical wormhole that acts as a shortcut by way of spacetime.
Each are not possible, given our present data of physics. Nonetheless, quantum entanglement and quantum tunneling each present results that seem like sooner than mild, and transmitting the code for an AI may be simpler than sending a human time traveller.
Fable: Busted, however good enjoyable
“I fear that the media has vastly distorted the notion of what AI is, the way it works, and what it’s able to,” says Walters, talking extra usually in regards to the present capabilities of AI.
“If hundreds of thousands of individuals genuinely begin believing that Satoshi Nakamoto is a time-travelling AI, that ought to be an unlimited wake-up name for us all. We now have greater issues if regular individuals imagine one thing that dumb.”
Walters says the true story of cypherpunks working collectively to resolve the double-spending downside is even higher than the time-traveling AI model.
“In the event you have a look at the evolution of Bitcoin, it’s the story of people that actually cared about one thing, actually believed in it and handed the baton from one to [another], sharing the data they acquired till that last piece, ‘proof-of-work,’ tied all of it collectively,” he says.
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Felix Ng
Felix Ng first started writing in regards to the blockchain trade by way of the lens of a playing trade journalist and editor in 2015. He has since moved into masking the blockchain area full-time. He’s most occupied with modern blockchain expertise aimed toward fixing real-world challenges.