Elon Musk names who he thinks Satoshi Nakamoto is

Everyone has a theory on who they think Bitcoin's founder "Satoshi Nakamoto" is and now billionaire Elon Musk has weighed in.  The name Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonym for the person (or persons) who developed Bitcoin, authored the Bitcoin white paper and came up with the first block chain database.

Since Bitcoins launch in January of 2009, nobody has claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto but many have denied to be him.  

The South African CEO of Tesla, founder of SpaceX and SNL promotor of Dogecoin, Elon Musk, has a theory and has shared it with the world.  

"It seems as though Nick Szabo is probably, more than anyone else, responsible for the evolution of those ideas," Musk said in a Podcast by artificial-intelligence researcher Lex Fridman on Tuesday.  "He claims not to be Nakamoto, but I'm not sure that's neither here nor there. But he seems to be the one more responsible for the ideas behind Bitcoin than anyone else."

In 2014 a study by The Aston University Centre for Forensic Linguistics, based in Birmingham, England, looked at the Bitcoin whitepaper and compared it to the writings of a number of people who were thought could be Satoshi.  The list included; Dorian S Nakamoto, Vili Lehdonvirta, Michael Clea, Shinichi Mochizuki, Gavin Andresen, Jed McCaleb, Dustin D Trammel, Hal Finney, Wei Dai, Neal King, Vladimir Oksman, Charles Bry and the aforementioned Nick Szabo.

The head of the team, Lecturer Dr Jack Grieve, concluded “The number of linguistic similarities between Szabo’s writing and the bitcoin whitepaper is uncanny, none of the other possible authors were anywhere near as good of a match."  The team found certain phrases used frequently in other writings by Szabo littered throughout the whitepaper such as “trusted third party” and “it should be noted”.

Grieve further stated “The case looks pretty clear-cut.  Szabo is an expert in law, finance, cryptography and computer science.  He created ‘bit gold’, a precursor to bitcoin, and was looking for collaborators in 2008. Did Nick Szabo create bitcoin?  We’re not sure, but we think he probably wrote the paper so it’s certainly worth a closer look.”

Of course Szabo has long denied being Satoshi Nakamoto.  The reclusive American of Hungarian decent has been cited by others to be Bitcoins founder including research by financial author Dominic Frisby and New York Times Journalist Nathaniel Popper but nobody knows for sure.  Szabo certainly had the perfect background to create the world's most dominate digital currency.

So do you agree with Musk?