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[return to "The NSA Invented Bitcoin?"]
1. gizajo+04[view] [source] 2023-09-21 15:48:54
>>wslh+(OP)
I’ve always assumed it was a state actor such as the NSA that invented it. Seems like the obvious step for such an organisation to take, even just for shits and giggles. There was an awful lot of talk about electronic gold and financial/crypto-havens in the 90s (see also Cryptonomicon) so it was brewing for a long time. Plus such an actor is one of the few who could keep quiet about it all this time - it’s part of the job. One would expect that we’d all know who Satoshi was by now, unless Satoshi was a state-sponsored collective effort.
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2. c7b+T9[view] [source] 2023-09-21 16:13:10
>>gizajo+04
There's math to show that the viability of a secret decreases rapidly as the number of people involved grows: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

The NSA couldn't even keep their data sniffing secret, the odds that they could keep the billion-dollar Bitcoin secret are not good (according to the theory above). There are more viable theories about Satoshi's identity and why/how he disappeared completely imho (eg Hal Finney). The paper and the name prove next to nothing, it's maybe a hint that one of the the creators might have had a US security clearance at some point.

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3. gizajo+Za[view] [source] 2023-09-21 16:18:05
>>c7b+T9
I agree… but governmental actors prone to secrecy are in fact very very good at keeping official secrets. Their jobs and basically their lives depend on it, and they swear oaths ensuring not to break secrets as part of their work. There’s heaps we don’t know about that are kept top secret, by your logic we should know about absolutely all of it, and the proof is that we don’t. A good example being the work of Turing and Bletchley Park that was kept secret for a few decades after the end of WWII that nobody knew about due to the importance of the crypto skills learned in combatting the Soviets afterwards. Tommy Flowers even implemented the first programmable computer called Colossus to break German encryption, and it was ordered to be destroyed at the end of the war, leading the world to believe that ENIAC was the first programmable computer. Secrets are kept all the time.
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