I read a very interesting article about Shiba Inu the other day and I wanted to give my thoughts on it as well to you all. If you want to read the articles yourself they are listed in the resources section at the bottom of this article.
The article in question goes into why they think that Elon Mush and Vitalik Buterin are the co-founders of Shiba-Inu and one of them is Ryoshi. I know that sounds like a bunch of garbage but let's get into the details first and let you draw your own conclusions.
On April 30th, 2019 Elon Musk tweeted out "Ethereum". To which Vitalk responded with "You should come to our Devcon in October :)". Then Elon responded with "What should be developed on Ethereum?".
One thing that needs to be noted is that at some point Vitalik deleted his initial response so you can't see this full thread anymore on Twitter. At first I thought okay maybe they are just making this Twitter exchange up to feed into their theory about who Ryoshi is, until I saw that they linked to a Finance.yahoo article from April 30th, 2019.
It is safe to assume that this twitter exchanged happened. However that doesn't mean one of them are Ryoshi. We all know Elon's tendency to tweet various things to get a response to queue up massive speculation. We need to remember the Elon from 2019.
Let's flash forward 1 year and 3 months or so and we are at August 3rd, 2020. The first blog post by the mysterious Ryoshi was posted on Medium. In this blog post Ryoshi talks about how they are not "very important".
Hello, I am Ryoshi, who I am is not very important and in a few moments you will understand why. I will give you a short background that I am an independent trader of cryptocurrency for a couple of years and have always been fascinated about the genesis of decentralized communities.
The verbage they use is questionable at times but overall the blog post goes into details about how when they created Shiba-Inu they didn't keep any tokens for themselves. What is interesting though is this next part...
First thing is I had a fren that i met at devcon last year in Osaka who has some influence in the space, we talk sometimes about Crypto philosophy and I told him the vision and he agreed to help. So he made a token contract and put half of it on Uniswap with 10ETH pair (he is successful business man so 10ETH is nothing for him) and threw away the liquidity keys so the ETH or the tokens can never be withdrawn. He then transferred the rest to me to do my part.
STEP ONE complete, we have a $SHIB token made and 50% Supply locked into sale contract and the other half to my burning wallet. Thank you fren!
Next we tell some more frens and WOW MOON LAMBO PUMPPPPPPY .
This is where the story gets interesting. Ryoshi met a 'friend' at Devcon last year which would be the 2019 Devcon in Osaka. And this friend was a successful business man who could front 10 Ethereum and it not be a big deal. You see where I am going with this? Something else to note is that 100% of the SHIBA tokens were put to the public to purchase so there is no 1 central entity that has a controlling interest. It was almost as if Shiba was created for the pure fun of it. OR what I theorize, to see how far this experiment could go. Say some rich business man and a blockchain developer got together and just wanted to have fun and see how much value a token could get without any payday's from exchanges or the like.
In this blog post though there is another very important detail to make clear...
I can say the one thing is to burn the rest of the tokens, you can see here that we sent over 50% of the TOTAL supply to Vitalik. There is no greatness without a vulnerable point and as long as vB doesn’t rug us, then SHIBA will grow and survive.
Now let's just say for argument sake that Vitalik was/is Ryoshi. Wouldn't it be smart then to try to convince people you are not yourself by acting as if you are this 3rd party person not interested in SHIBA at all and so you send a bunch of SHIB to yourself? It makes sure that the rug doesn't get pulled on the Shiba token because well you can only trust yourself. AND it also sort of solidifies the token by anchoring it with the creator of Ethereum.
In the second quote it is stated that the business man transferred "the other half" to Ryoshi. And in the same post they state how Ryoshi sent half of all SHIB to Vitalik... Seems fishy no?
Also I find it funny that they saw "WOW MOON LAMBO PUMPPPPPPY" because well Elon Musk shot a rocket into space with a freaking Tesla onboard. Just sayin.
Next we travel to May 29th, 2021. This is where Ryoshi posts their 4th and final Medium post. There are 2 meaningful parts to this post I want to touch on.
I have said from the beginning, I am a nobody, I am not important. The efforts to unmask my “identity” even if successful would be underwhelming. I am just some guy of no consequence tapping at a keyboard and I am replaceable. I am Ryoshi.
This could be taken at face value as the person is on none importance to all of us. It may just be some guy in some basement somewhere who created Shiba-Inu. However back to conspiracy theory time. It sounds like to me that they are trying to get us to believe they are nobody, but who would do that except someone who IS somebody but doesn't want the limelight, at least not yet...
The next quote is:
With Shiba, we have from the beginning made very clear that no-one is in charge. There is no man accountable, no person responsible and no entity has the keys to the kingdom. Even as the Shiba Token “mooned” I got many messages like “ryo, you must be a billionaire now, haha” but the reality is still to this day I own 0 SHIB. Why? Well if I did, then I can’t be who I am and for now I know that I have a role to play. I can’t be pure and unbiased if I am worried about price up and down and taking profits. (don’t worry, the great Shiba will reward me in other ways i guess)
The first half could very well be true. No keys to the kingdom and all that. But the interesting part is where Ryoshi claims to own zero SHIB. That is very interesting to me. What programmer that you know would create something as big as a blockchain and not have any bit of it themselves. Even if they purchased some themselves? If Vitalik is Ryoshi then maybe he created a separate wallet and bought some SHIB but not owning any seems not probable. Even if the creator of SHIB is an every day Joe (or Jane) I don't believe they own zero SHIB. And to be honest, I don't know if I would trust a product/company/entity that didn't have any vested interest in their product. Unless though their interest in the product is that it is one big experiment and seeing the end result without swaying it's price is key.
Think about it. Does Elon talk about Shiba-Inu on Twitter? No, he talks about Bitcoin or Ethereum or even Dogecoin. Why is that? Is it truly because he doesn't even have SHIB on his radar because it's so small? Dogecoin was small at one point too and a few tweets from Elon changed that :)
I am not saying that without a doubt Ryoshi is Elon or Vitalik. I am however saying though that I can see where people would draw that conclusion. I think for legality reasons though Elon wouldn't be the founder of a cryptocurrency. He has contracts with the US government and I don't think he will EVER come out as Ryoshi. But also maybe that is why he doesn't own any SHIB because he doesn't want to get caught up in legal issues if he is the creator of it.
On the other hand I could see Vitalik being Ryoshi more easily. Ryoshi did say they met a friend at Devcon and this friend was a rich business man who fronted a few ETH for the trading pair. Vitalik is no stranger to creating a cryptocurrency. Vitalik could even have wanted to make SHIB (the Doge Killer) as a 'joke' to the 'joke' cryptocurrency because he felt slighted by Doge making fun of his baby Ethereum. Again this is all hypothetical but none the less it is fun to think about and put on our conspiracy theory hats for a little while.
