The Bitcoin Mafia

PayPal x Sopranos

By now, everyone and their mothers is familiar with the PayPal Mafia.

The group of early founders and employees at PayPal is analogous to the USA Basketball Dream Team, as a special collection of individuals created a monolith at PayPal ($73B) and then went on to dominate in their own ventures. Here are a few names you might be familiar with:

Elon Musk ($248B, Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink), Peter Thiel ($9B, Palantir, Founders Fund, Clarium Capital), Reid Hoffman ($4B, LinkedIn, Greylock Partners), Jawad Karim, Steve Chen & Chad Hurley ($300M, 500M & 800M respectively, YouTube), Jeremy Stoppelman & Russel Simmons ($200M+, Yelp), and more.

With all that being said, forget about Tesla, SpaceX, Palantir, LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp, and the other unicorns founded by PayPal alums…today, we’re here to talk about PayPal Mafia’s greatest creation: Bitcoin.

The Truth Hides in Plain Sight

According to mainstream sources, Bitcoin was founded by Satoshi Nakamoto, a presumed pseudonym for the person or group who developed Bitcoin, authored the white paper, and deployed the original reference implementation. While there is no definite answer to who the mystery man is, experts believe it’s a group of software coders in the U.S. or Europe.

However, I am here to tell you it is, in fact, Thiel, Musk, and (potentially) affiliated members of the PayPal Mafia.

In Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, Thiel writes: “At least PayPal had a suitably grand mission - the kind that post bubble skeptics would later describe as grandiose: we wanted to create a new internet currency to replace the U.S. dollar.”

In an interview with Tucker Carlson discussing who blew up Nord Stream 2, Vladimir Putin, implying it was the CIA, asserts: “people always say look for someone who is interested, but not only someone who is interested but also someone who has the capability…for there may be many people who are interested but very few are capable.”

In this case, there are very few people or groups in the world who have previously stated that their mission was to create a digital currency that would rival the U.S. dollar and also have the capability to do so, not only because of their expertise in tech and encryption, but their connections to the most important asset when creating revolutionary ideas: intelligence agencies.

Intelligence is Key

Before talking about the intelligence community, just a few more bullets of supporting evidence:

• Musk and Thiel have been huge supporters, early adopters, and investors in cryptocurrencies. Earlier this year, Thiel and his VC firm, The Founders Fund, made a $200M investment in crypto before the bull run

• Musk has been issuing positive statements on Bitcoin since 2014 and at one point allowed BTC to be an acceptable form of payment for Teslas (later reversed)

• Donald Trump has made a 180 degree turn on crypto, from calling it a “crime-riddled scam” to speaking at the 2024 Bitcoin Conference and calling for the firing of Gary Gensler, the head of the SEC, due to heavy regulations pushed on the crypto industry

  • What has sparked the change of heart? While hard to pinpoint exactly, the heavy stream of donations from Silicon Valley and the arrival of JD Vance certainly plays a role. Speaking of JD Vance, who bankrolled his entire political (and venture capital) career? You guessed it: Peter Thiel

When digging into the creation of world-changing companies like Google, Facebook, and more, you inevitably find either direct or indirect links to intelligence agencies (almost always DARPA). Whether it’s DARPA heavily funding Sergey Brin and Larry Page at Google or the links that Facebook has to DARPA’s brainchild LifeLog, the largest companies, especially tech, and the deep state go hand in hand.

It is fair to say that one can reasonably reach the same conclusion about crypto: the odds that such a game-changing piece of technology was made by an inconsequential group of coders in their garage is essentially zero.

Given the ubiquitous connections that both Musk and (especially) Thiel have to the intelligence community, the most likely explanation is some type of collaboration between Musk, Thiel, DARPA, or other intelligence agencies.

Thiel’s connections to intelligence agencies are about as explicit as can possibly be: his company, Palantir, sells software and mines massive data sets for intelligence agencies like the NSA, FBI, CIA, and Mossad.

Not only was the CIA the sole client of Palantir from 2005 to 2008, but the CIA was also a major funder of the company. In other words, Palantir is the main player in the growing Big Brother-like surveillance state that has been steadily expanding post 9/11.

Musk’s connections, on the other hand, are a bit more inconspicuous. It was recently reported that SpaceX signed a $1.8B contract with an obscure intel agency called the National Reconnaissance Office, whose main job is to manage satellites. This contract will help SpaceX build a network of hundreds of spy satellites for an undisclosed reason.

This type of contract isn’t novel; SpaceX has been working with national security organizations since its infancy, as it won a launch contract with an undisclosed US intel agency shortly after being founded in 2002.

All this to say, these two guys are very familiar with the intelligence community and the idea that these types of characters would work with intelligence agencies to create something they’ve said themselves they yearn to create is very plausible.

The real question is this: is Bitcoin the global currency that the elites have been drooling over for decades?

I guess that’s a question for a later day.

Thanks for reading and until next time.

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