People are asking if Bitcoin came from the PayPal mafia, intelligence agencies, or even someone like Jeffrey Epstein.

The honest answer is: we’ll probably never know who created Bitcoin and that’s not the most important question anyway.

Epstein clearly wasn’t Satoshi. He wasn’t technical. But the emails suggest he was aware of Bitcoin very early and connected to people in the space like Gavin Andresen and Adam Back. He likely knew the kinds of people who could build something like Bitcoin.

More broadly, the idea that Bitcoin started as a completely pure, outsider project isn’t really true. Powerful networks, especially people tied to PayPal and early tech finance, were involved early, mining, investing, and experimenting with digital money long before Bitcoin took off.

That matters, because those early players may still hold a significant share of the supply today. If Bitcoin becomes a global reserve asset, that concentration could translate into enormous wealth and influence.

But it also doesn’t matter in one key way: owning Bitcoin doesn’t give you control over the network. You can’t change the rules, inflate the supply, or censor transactions just because you hold a lot of it.

The bigger point is that Bitcoin didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It came out of years of experimentation with digital economies, online currencies, and attempts to build money native to the internet. People like Epstein weren’t necessarily creators but they were connectors, investors, and early observers of this shift.

So focusing too much on “who created Bitcoin” misses the real issue.

The real question is what Bitcoin becomes.

Does it actually deliver on the promise of open, neutral, global money? Or does it get absorbed into the existing financial system used by the same institutions to extend their power, manage riba debt, and reshape the system on new rails?

Mark Goodwin: