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Comment by Phlarp | Hacker News Reader

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This is ridiculously ahistorical: the early Bitcoin releases had all kinds of bugs in them[1], and there was a reasonably large enthusiast community looking at it for years before widespread adoption.

The US government doesn't need to burn coal to fund the clandestine services. They just put it in a budget line item whose contents are classified.

[1]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposu...

FWIW the GP didn’t say US; there are many more intel orgs and govs desperate for money than the US.

Sure; I'm curious which intelligence organization you (or the GP) think is most likely, then.

Keep in mind that (1) most intelligence organizations and clandestine services operate with even less oversight than the US's, and (2) all available evidence points to Satoshi Nakamoto being an L1 English speaker who was mostly active in Western European timezones.

If you're assuming that Satoshi was a spook, wouldn't the use of L1 English and Western timezones more likely to be an attempt to obfuscate?

This results in logical regress: any positive evidence that Nakamoto was a native-English speaking Westerner can be spun into negative evidence of an exceptionally advanced adversary.

In other words, it's "that's just what they want you to think!" logic. And that can be true, but it's not exceptionally convincing.

I find it no more convincing that the whole notion of Bitcoin being some kind of covert CIA (Mossad, FSB, ...) money laundering operation in the first place. If we're willing to go there in the first place, then we should admit that none of the obvious cues are likely to be truthful.

Sure, I can agree with that. That's an awfully long con!

North Korea seems to have been weaponizing it more aggressively than anyone at this point.

And yet the Cia found it useful to sell cocaine. And that's in a country that has unlimited funding.

>math and code were nearly perfect with zero peer review

Bitcoin had to be forked in the early years due to critical errors in the original code. There was nothing perfect about it.

Yup, there was a bug that allowed the attacker to create an unlimited number of Bitcoin, it was fixed, but there seems to be this myth that SN provided complete bug free working code from the outset.

Where can I read more about this? Super interesting.

These should give you some background

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2018/09/21/the-latest-bitco...

https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-history-part-10-the-184-bil...

It’s also pretty well established that there was some peer review.

Peer review before the white paper was published? I'd be fascinated to learn more about any such conversations.

Here you go!

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/11/26/previously-unpub...

Yes, but implementation errors-- not fundamental flaws in the theory or underlying mathematics.

It's not a statement about such things being impossible, just unlikely to come from a single individual working in complete isolation up until the bitcion whitepaper release.

Additionally this alone would be merely peculiar on it's own, coupled with the lack of retrospective investigations uncovering -anything at all- significant about the person moves it to suspicious. Adding in the subject matter of cryptography + pseudo anonymous money and it strains credulity not to consider

You're placing way more value on this than makes sense: Bitcoin makes use of good primitives, but no better than any expected familiar with the SoTA in the late 2000s would have selected for a greenfield project.

Maybe the most unusual primitive selection in Bitcoin is secp256k1 for ECDSA, instead of one of the more common NIST curves. But even that is understandable, given that Nakamoto was active in the cypherpunk community and concern around the constants used in the NIST curves was a common discussion item at the time.

The primitive selection looks rather informed with the hindsight of NSA compromising the security of NIST curves

As far as I know, there's no concrete evidence that the NSA has compromised the security of the NIST curves. That would be weird for them to do, since they use those curves internally to encrypt data classified at Secret and higher.

Are you thinking of Dual EC?

Yes, but implementation errors-- not fundamental flaws in the theory or underlying mathematics.

Respectfully, I believe you are looking at Bitcoin through rose colored glasses.

There is nothing special about Bitcoin's theory or underlying mathematics.

There's good evidence that Satoshi is Adam Back:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfcvX0P1b5g

Isn’t it just as likely that he was an actual person who simply died years ago? Hence why no one ever came forward.

NSA intern 20% project? Lmao

Well, who would love to have a decentralised payment system that will inevitably attract criminal activity, but also makes every transaction public information?

> ...a black ops funding scheme...

More specifically, a scheme to enable transferring funds in/out of foreign countries to securely bribe informants and supply agents with money.

It's the logical companion to Tor, which was created by the U.S. government to facilitate secure information transfer in/out of foreign countries. But when they created Bitcoin, they decided to make it anonymous after the mistake of doing Tor in the open.

Maybe...

Bitcoin isn’t anonymous. The transfers of coins are there permanently for all to see.

Yes, the ledger is public, but good luck identifying which transfers are bribes paid to informants within your government. This is same problem any foreign government would have.

Satoshi is (so far)

Satoshi got away, which is a very different phenomenon from Bitcoin as a protocol being anonymous.

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