In the late 1990s, PayPal's founding vision centered on creating a new world currency free from all government control and dilution.
Mixed Partly true and partly false in roughly equal measure.
Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?
What would count as true or false
Judge as of 2009-04-13 against PayPal's documented early history. True: records from 1998–2000 (founders' statements, internal memos, contemporary press, histories) show PayPal/Confinity's founding vision centred on a new world currency free from government control and dilution. Mostly true: that vision was clearly put forward as a central aim (e.g. in Thiel's speeches to staff) but alongside other stated goals of equal weight, such as Palm Pilot payments or email payments. Mixed: the vision was put forward but was one of several aims, and it is unclear whether it was central. Mostly false: the idea appears only as rhetoric from Thiel, while the company's actual founding aim was a different product (e.g. cryptography or mobile payments). False: there is no contemporary record of any such vision.
Set before the research began.
Evidence (4)
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E1 Who Killed PayPal? Cato Institute (commentary by Radley Balko) · 27 August 2005
“Thiel and Levchin had hoped PayPal would grow to become an extra-governmental system of currency”
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E2 Who Killed PayPal? Cato Institute (commentary by Radley Balko) · 27 August 2005
“In the book’s first chapter, Jackson recalls a speech Thiel gave to Confinnity employees, just a few days after he began work, in which he described his hopes for PayPal to become a borderless private currency.”
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E3 Beaming Money by Email is Web's Next Killer App PR Newswire (press release hosted on paypalobjects.com) · 16 November 1999 Own record
“Confinity, a pioneer in the future of mobile payments, today launched PayPal.com, the first Web-based service that enables consumers to beam money via email, Palm organizers, cell phones, pagers and other web-enabled devices.”
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E4 PayPal - The Beamers Didn't Come Commoncog (Idea Maze case) · 13 November 2007
“Its co-founders, Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek, were initially focused on providing security services for enterprise customers with handheld devices.”
Reasoning
Independent commentary reports that Thiel and Levchin hoped PayPal would become an extra-governmental currency (E1), and that Thiel described it to Confinity staff as a borderless private currency (E2). However, the co-founders were reportedly first focused on security services for handheld devices (E4), and the 1999 launch press release frames PayPal as mobile and email payments, with no mention of a world currency (E3). So the currency vision was put forward as one of several aims, and the evidence does not show it was the central founding vision.
Cite this claim
Peter Thiel, “In the late 1990s, PayPal's founding vision centered on creating a new world currency free from all government control and dilution.” (said 13 April 2009). Verdict: mixed. Reliability API, claim c_e7c8b3c7ad8a, method 0.1.0+3e03e2df, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_e7c8b3c7ad8a
This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.
Reply to this claim
More factual claims by Peter Thiel
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Mostly true
“But if tech means producing more with less, then we should be seeing dramatic economic progress, we don't.”
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Mostly true
“I tend to measure it in things like these economic terms in the way that the average millennial is having a tougher time than their boomer parents at the same point in life.”
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Mostly true
“California is not poor.”
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Mostly true
“The average California government worker gets paid twice as much as the average private sector worker in California.”
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Mostly true
“We weren't deeply connected to the Soviet Union.”
The US economy was not deeply connected to the Soviet Union's during the Cold War.
Verdicts are made automatically; how verdicts are made.