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 build some sort of AI model that had any sort of intelligence at all? You just wouldn’t have the time. You just wouldn’t have the resources… it just theoretically wouldn’t exist,” he explains.
Okamoto says there’s a higher probability that shapeshifting lizard people control the Earth than that AI created Bitcoin in 2008.
Funnily enough, we have a story about that:
AI couldn’t write Bitcoin today
Even AI today, with its advanced Will Smith spaghetti-eating video generation capabilities, would probably still struggle to code something like Bitcoin.
“I’m not confident the AI we have today could create Bitcoin, even with a pretty serious engineer behind it,” says Walters.
“AI-enabled programming is obviously the future, but it’s only worked at all for about two years, and the jury is still out on if it codes well.”
Okamoto agrees, noting that ChatGPT, which has grown leaps and bounds in recent years, still makes simple calculation errors today.
“It’s 2025, you know, and you’ve got [GPT-5] now, and they built it with, you know, billions of dollars worth of hardware running for months and months and months. Like the most sophisticated compute hardware in the world and the smartest data scientists in the world. And the thing is wrong on, like, basic math,” he says.
Okamato says while it is plausible that AI could create a new cryptocurrency today based on the existing Bitcoin codebase, it’s a far bigger ask for it to create something wholly original and unique like Bitcoin was at the time.
Could AI have traveled back in time?
If it’s plausible for an AI to create cryptocurrency today,then it’ll definitely have the capability to create Bitcoin in the future. But why would it want to?
The theory explains that AI created Bitcoin to entice humans to build a massive, decentralized network of computing power, ensuring it could never be taken offline.
And with 25,000 Bitcoin nodes in the world right now and counting, we’re playing right into its hands.
So all the AI would have to do is invent Bitcoin and then solve the problem of time travel.
Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity tells us that slowing down or speeding up time isn’t really too hard. The flow of time isn’t constant; we can experience time differently based on how fast we’re travelling through space. The faster we travel, the slower time passes (relative to others who are travelling slower).
Scientists proved this in 1971 by putting atomic clocks on commercial airlines that flew twice around the world, finding that they ticked a tiny bit slower than the ones on the ground at the United States Naval Observatory.
However, it becomes significantly trickier once you want to go backward in time.
There are a couple of theoretical ways to do it, and without boring you with the details, these involve either moving faster than the speed of light or creating an “Einstein-Rosen bridge” — a theoretical wormhole that acts as a shortcut through spacetime.
Both are impossible, given our current knowledge of physics. However, quantum entanglement and quantum tunneling both show effects that appear to be faster than light, and transmitting the code for an AI might be easier than sending a human time traveller.
Myth: Busted, but good fun
“I worry that the media has vastly distorted the perception of what AI is, how it works, and what it’s capable of,” says Walters, speaking more generally about the current capabilities of AI.
“If millions of people genuinely start believing that Satoshi Nakamoto is a time-travelling AI, that should be an enormous wake-up call for us all. We have bigger problems if normal people believe something that dumb.”
Timeline is excited about the $20k Neo robot. Watch it try to close a dishwasher. We are not ready. 😅 pic.twitter.com/KBB1UeWuVA
— Simon Taylor (@sytaylor) October 29, 2025
Okamato says the real story of cypherpunks working together to solve the double-spending problem is even better than the time-traveling AI version.
“If you look at the evolution of Bitcoin, it’s the story of people who really cared about something, really believed in it and handed the baton from one to [another], sharing the knowledge they acquired until that final piece, ‘proof-of-work,’ tied it all together,” says Walters.
Felix Ng
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