I would guess he is probably known with a high degree of certainty to at least one nation's intelligence but that publicizing that knowledge and the documentation of it is not in anyone's interest.
If a currency like Monero with further developed scaling and privacy features is able to gain a foothold in developing nations, and enough off-ramps are set up via decentralized exchanges like Bisq and through direct acceptance for goods and services, then it is difficult to see the spread stopping between nations with reasonably free Internet, especially as factions within each government will likely have some direct interest.
The US dollar will be least threatened, the longest.
However for decentralized people to people transactions, monero may have its chance.
Since I’m far from a crypto bro, I wasn’t suggesting this ;)
I don’t even own any crypto.
As cryptocurrency already requires the safeguarding of a private key or a custodial partner doing so, and generally do not accept rollbacks on the base level, there isn’t that much added drawback to making strong privacy default.
But! Bitcoins are too clunky to threaten the federal reserve really. And, a system that is widely understood by laymen to be anonymous, but is actually pseudonymous and inherently traceable, seems like Christmas for intelligence and police organizations.
USDT/USDC are far easier to acquire than actual USD in third world countries. There’s a separate economy built up in Africa, Phillippines, etc. that operates entirely on USDT.
You can see this in the price of USDT vs USD in these countries - USDT commands a premium.
Crypto via coins like USDT means that Nigerians increasingly want to work for USDT, not Naira. Bad for Naira, good for the USD
A large part of that value is derived from a market cap based upon the stability created by the dormant coins, like gold sitting dormant in fort knox used to stabilize the USD value.
It really does seem like an intelligent design passes Occam's razor more than "oops i conveniently formatted that harddrive then disappeared"
I think we can safely expect at least one major CBDC-based cross-border payment system to launch by the end of the year. Soramitsu is the most promising candidate IMHO. A prevailing theory is that foreign corporations that operate domestically within a country will need to create accounts with a domestic central bank for CBDC payments to work efficiently. If this becomes a reality, the status of the dollar's "exorbitant privilege" will be up for immediate dispute. Its geopolitical hegemony over global finance won't be swept away overnight, but it will suffer a major blow. Only time will tell how serious.
> It isn't nothing new,
It is though. The infrastructure to support cross-border payments with CBDCs is bleeding edge stuff. The term floated around in obscurity for a while, but it's only been in use since 2019 or so. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_CBDCs_by_country
Moreover, CBDCs are ill-suited for internation trade, or for any kind of trade, because they're cash-like. They're intended as a substitute for physical cash.
I think reasonable minds can disagree about whether CBDCs are any more or less suitable than the alternatives (which seem worse to me in some respects, and certainly are worse in others) but either way, the world's central banks are singing a similar tune in unison right now. Like it or not, the macroeconomic tailwinds favor a more decentralized approach to cross-border settlements and we'll soon have infrastructure to enable this at massive scale.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdca/pr/fbi-s-encrypted-phone-p...
Zero knowledge proofs and other strong privacy protections are available on more modern projects. Some ledgers are entirely dark, granting a decent anonymity set.
I’m pointing out that even if Bitcoin was the creation, the introduction of this concept and class of data structure is much more important and will have more lasting impact.
Surely any government agency would have considered the feasibility of new alternatives with similar designs.
The USA is in a debt spiral spending $659B on interest on debt annually (13% of tax revenue) while running larger and larger deficits. This cannot really be escaped, and it's impact on inflation is becoming unavoidable.
To move assets to agents without a trace?
About energy: https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-price... says that China and Russia both have lower absolute household electricity prices than eg the US. But they are higher when compared to average incomes.
Any rich Chinese could've banked on cryptocurrency. Also, the poor in China and Russia are very poor. While the rich and middle incomes could easily afford energy prizes.
I don't know about China but Russia is a maffia state in disguise where a criminal rich club runs it with Putin. The middle class (those living in St. Petersburg and Moscow) need to be kept happy enough as a kind of unwritten deal between Putin and those people.
What does this have to do with inventing Bitcoin? And what does it have to do with living 'anonymously over the internet'? Btw, you can try hacking into Chinese targets and getting caught, and seeing whether you face any legal repercussions.
But, what does any of what you say have to do with inventing Bitcoin?
Especially as you say, if you are rich in China or Russia, more likely than not you are on more than friendly terms with the ruling clique. So what do you need cryptocurrency for?
That is the conundrum isn't it. It is being marketed as some kind of liberal utopia but right now it can be used to work around the (quite massive) trade blocks. It really works both ways, but there's one group who love it either way (albeit also the more anonymous successor): criminals. What is the most criminal country in world (not relative to size)? Russia. It isn't even a country it is the Russian maffia in disguise as a country. If you you look at who benefits, it is also a deeply isolated country such as North Korea. And Bitcoin / PoW is a great method to get rid of your excess nuclear energy which is a fit for China. All have a motive.
> Btw, you can try hacking into Chinese targets and getting caught, and seeing whether you face any legal repercussions.
If I were very good at this and would enjoy it I'd work for some Western secret service. Very decent paycheck, morally on the better side of the spectrum, and well imagine having fun at work.
That used to be the case, but not anymore. What are they going to do, exactly - protest on the streets? Since 2011, all that gets you is a beating and a fine (and now worse). Leave? That's economically infeasible for many who have already invested into property and can't easily unload it for reasonable money; people who thought the trade-off worthwhile have already largely left after 2022.
Vader (father in Dutch) put it well in Cloud City, talking to Lando: I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.
It used to be that "mothers' committees" held more sway, but those have also been mostly subdued now. Thing is, once you get to a certain point, civil protest just doesn't account for much, and people there simply aren't organized enough for meaningful violent resistance - and besides, most of them live too good a life to risk their neck engaging in such.
The meme of crypto people claiming to be fighting against the central banking or currency is cynical to put it mildly.
This can only be mitigated, not prevented, and not likely in the first example of a currency outside nation state control, which was unthinkable previously. It’s a possible option for evading asset seizure or hyperinflation from a despotic government to not insignificant numbers of people already. One step at a time.
Ethereum 2.0’s proof of stake eliminates the ability of the biggest actors to stockpile and control supply of hardware, while also providing stronger security and massively reducing energy use from mining.
On its face, directly staking coins over accurate security validations makes the problem even more obvious, but the result is that the rich accelerate their ownership slower.
You may be well served by speaking with some of the very well intentioned people working on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Monero. From my experiences the majority of them do believe they are bettering the world, as do most who work in open source anywhere, and they continue to strive much more for that reason than any indirect personal enrichment.
It'd be tough to get three people to keep this quiet. The dozens that would have to be involved at an intelligence agency, if this is really a project that was started in one of them? The specifics would have leaked by now.
Incompetence fallacy and impossibility complex. Just because something seems difficult or impossible doesn't mean it is. Especially when it's the most logical explanation. People often like to think the government is just a bunch of incompetent bureaucrats. Yet the U.S. government is the most powerful entity on earth. There's not a single reason to believe that any large number of government employees could keep a secret on the level of Satoshi's true identity.