Hacker News Reader

Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

I believe BitCoin is one of the very few successful crypto protocols that, instead of being developed in the open, pretty much came out fully formed. In addition, it was developed first as a Windows program. This makes the conspiracy part of me, suspect that BitCoin may in fact have been developed by the NSA to enable moving black ops money around more easily. It was released to the public so there would be enough background noise that these transactions would not stand out.

View on HN

Who the hell moves black ops money in open public ledger like bitcoin's blockchain is. It is easier to launder money though banks than bitcoin because bank transactions are not public and hence under less scrutiny. Bitcoin was made by still unknown C++ programmer and computer science enthusiast.

1) The US owns the SWIFT network and monitors transactions globally.

2) During the Falklands War, Argentina was prevented from buying munitions since South American banks were monitored for transactions with Europe. Like any bureaucracy, once they used a bank, they never moved to a new one after a transaction.

US does not own SWIFT, SWIFT is a Belgian company and it is in compliance with Belgian law and with international law through Belgium. Like any other company it must turn in information if requested by court order.

For example US was deep into banking system of Middle East countries[1] because they couldn't get all SWIFT transactions they wanted.

If you are to blame SWIFT blame Belgium first because they essentially decide what happens with SWIFT at the first place. After 2001 world is not the same, anti-terrorist and anti-laundering laws are pervasive but I suppose for greater good.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/15/us/shadow-brokers-nsa-hac...

There were numerous prior attempts to create digital cash publicly, some of them went to jail for trying. Szabo was asking if anyone wanted to help build bitgold, apparently no one answered the call. The initial Bitcoin release was very far from a finished codebase or "fully formed".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com