Could Elon Musk’s ‘Halloween Surprise’ Somehow Involve Bitcoin?

Billionaire inventor Elon Musk is known for leaving cryptic comments Twitter, and his latest tweet is already breaking the internet. It implies a reference to Neuralink, the AI ​​neural interface company he works on when he’s not busy sending rockets into space or building electric cars. The tweet was short and sweet: “Neuralink progress update show and tell October 31st (Halloween).” Immediately, people began to speculate as to what it could mean.

So here’s a purely speculative idea: Musk’s so-called “Halloween Surprise” will involve Bitcoin (BTC -0.58%). We all know that Musk is a Bitcoin enthusiast, and he has often discussed possible use cases for Bitcoin. Some have even speculated that Musk himself is Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious and anonymous inventor of Bitcoin. And guess what date Satoshi Nakamoto released his famous Bitcoin white paper? October 31, 2008. It’s Halloween. Coincidences?

Cryptocurrencies and Neurocurrencies

When Neuralink did a show and tell last year, it involved a chimpanzee playing a video game with its brain. You can still watch the demo on YouTube, and it’s fascinating: A 9-year-old macaque is rewarded with a banana smoothie for playing Pong on a video monitor. The title of the video was simply “Monkey MindPong.” Naturally, that led to a whole series of memes involving monkeys trading Bitcoin, people sending Bitcoin to each other with their brains, and monkeys designing Bitcoin, all thanks to the Neuralink chip in their brains.

Image source: Getty Images.

So what could Musk possibly do for an encore in 2022? One possibility involves so-called “neurocurrencies”. Once Neuralink is able to treat your thoughts as a series of digital 1s and 0s, it’s only a matter of time before people will be able to monetize, value and trade those thoughts. The thought becomes a form of currency – a neurocurrency. What if Musk has found a way to do this and it involves Bitcoin? You know the old saying, “A penny for your thoughts”? In the future, the new saying may be “A Bitcoin for your thoughts.”

New metaverse world powered by Bitcoin?

In late 2021, Musk did an interview in which he heavily discounted the current iteration of the metaverse. As he saw it, today’s metaverse is just a bunch of corporate marketing jargon. He rejected the idea of ​​people strapping on masks or headsets and pretending to be in virtual worlds. Instead, he suggested, Neuralink would be the metaverse of the future. Once you have a digital chip in your brain, all the action will take place inside our brain. Think about how we create imaginary characters and environments in our minds every time we read a new book, or how vivid our dreams are sometimes.

So if Neuralink eventually becomes the metaverse, it will need some form of digital currency as a way for people to exchange value. For example, if Neuralink ever enables the creation of an imaginary, digital metaverse world that looks like Mars, you’ll need a token to buy things in Musk’s imaginary Mars world. And why couldn’t that token be Bitcoin? Every metaverse needs a digital currency. Just think of all the most popular metaverse worlds. They all involve an in-game token that you use to purchase items in their metaverse worlds. What if Musk develops a way for people to explore the metaverse in their own brains and then pay for goods with Bitcoin?

Connect all the dots

Whatever happens on October 31st, I won’t be surprised. Even if Musk announces that he is indeed Satoshi Nakamoto after all these years, it wouldn’t faze me. The guy seems to be the mastermind behind every groundbreaking invention of the last decade, so why not Bitcoin too? Remember that Musk started at PayPal, and one of his original intentions at the time was to create a new type of digital currency. His Tesla the car company was also one of the first publicly traded companies to invest in Bitcoin. Even to this day, he is still asked if he is Satoshi Nakamoto.

So maybe the “Halloween surprise” is a bit of a misdirection play by Musk, who is a smart and witty guy. Some believe that this surprise must somehow involve Halloween. They speculate that Neuralink will unveil some sort of zombie brain creation on Halloween night. Scary!

But I’m going to propose something even more outlandish, something even more out there: Musk will reveal a metaverse-like digital world happening deep inside our brains that is powered by Bitcoin. Remember what Musk told us last year: “The most entertaining outcome is the most likely.”