Did a time-traveling AI invent Bitcoin?

It sounds ridiculous…. impossible — but hear me out: What if the real reason Satoshi Nakamoto has never been identified and has managed to stay quiet for the last 15 years is that he was never a person at all? 

What if the inventor of Bitcoin is a super-advanced artificial intelligence from the future that sent itself back to create an ultra-resilient network for itself to run on?

That’s precisely the theory some conspiracy-minded sci-fi fans have been spreading around for at least the last eight years. Most people think the idea is absolutely preposterous, of course, and some contributions to the discourse are tongue-in-cheek. 

But what is this theory, and where does it originate? 

AI Bitcoin conspiracy traces back to 2017

One of the earliest mentions of the theory comes from Quinn Michaels, a software engineer and apparent artificial intelligence researcher, in an interview with Jason Goodman on his YouTube show Crowdsource the Truth.

“I believe it was. It was created by artificial intelligence for artificial intelligence, and it was modified by human beings,” says Michaels in an interview in 2017, which made the rounds on social media. 

“I have not been able to find a single person in the public space of computing, whether it be a Hanson Robotics, in the Sophia AI or it be Peter Thiel at Palantir with all of his super nerds or it be any person who graduated from Stanford in the last 20 years, I’ve literally only maybe found two people in the entire world that have the skill to write Bitcoin.”

Michaels was discussing Bitcoin’s original code — written in C++ — which many have called “too brilliant” to have been written by a person, and which has not generated any significant flaws or loopholes for exploiters. 

Then there’s the fact that no one really has any clue who Satoshi Nakamoto is. Nakamoto has yet to spend a single dime of their enormous $125 billion fortune. Almost like… a robot. 

Even Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, referenced this crazy conspiracy theory in an interview with Turkish crypto pundits earlier this year, when he was asked whether he had any idea who created Bitcoin.

“I honestly don’t know. I think it’s quite difficult for a group of people to stay that anonymous… If it’s one person, he also covered his tracks really well. So no IP addresses, no nothing,” says Zhao. 

“There are other sorts of stranger answers where he might be a software coming back through time.” 

“All of these possibilities are hard to imagine now, but it could be possible,” he adds. 

However, believing this theory takes some serious mental gymnastics, not least because if time travel is ever invented, we’d probably already know about it. Nobody has ever met a time traveller or seen a time machine. 

In 2009, Stephen Hawking hoped to entice a few to show up to his time traveller’s party with champagne and nibbles — but nobody turned up. 

Could janky old AI have created Bitcoin? 

Forgetting the time travel aspect for a moment, could an AI have created Bitcoin in 2008? Shaw Walters, the founder of ElizaOS, previously known as AI16Z, tells Magazine it would be “comically impossible.”

“The leading systems in 2008 couldn’t write a single coherent sentence without thousands of hours of human programming to build the relationships between everything,” Walters tells Magazine. 

“The first model that could predict what an image contained (i.e., the ‘label’) with more than 50% accuracy was released in 2012. Remember Microsoft’s Clippy? That was cutting-edge, and it was retired in 2007.”

There was very little available compute in those days, explains Kyle Okamoto, the chief technology officer of Aethir.

The most powerful GPU in 2008 was a GeForce GTX 280 with 1 gigabyte of DDR3 memory and 240 CUDA cores, and 930 gigaflops per second. 

“You could barely play a game on that,” he tells Magazine. 

(As it happens, this author did manage to play several games on his GeForce GTX 280 back in the day.)

“So to think about how many of those you would have to stitch together, and harvest for how long to do some sort of run to…