Comment by AlexDanger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AlexDanger | Hacker News Reader

Is there any evidence of nation states or three letter agencies dipping their toes into Bitcoin? Its seems like a perfect solution for the CIA when they need to move money quickly and discretely to 'difficult' regions or individuals.

I know that Gavin Andresen (unofficial leader of Bitcoin movement) did a talk for the CIA in 2011. But I dont know if their interest was about catching bad guys, using it for themselves or seeking to control/manipulate bitcoin: http://www.bitcointrading.com/pdf/GavinAndresenCIATalk.pdf

So I think an interesting question is whether these same agencies are generating bitcoins or attempting to manipulate the market. The big news recently for Bitcoin is the introduction of ASIC hardware dedicated to mining. An ASIC miner the size of a PC can generate bitcoin hashes 100x faster than a GPU at approximately the same power usage.

ASIC miners have taken a while to hit the market because making an ASIC is hard and expensive for a small company. You can bet they didnt get funding from a brick and mortar bank. There are only a couple of companies with a shippable product.

But surely making this same hardware is a relatively trivial exercise for a nation state, particularly the NSA who run their own fab and would be experts at making silicon tuned for crypto algorithms.

Thoughts?

NSA use FPGAs. Even they can't afford ASICs unless its a supercomputer CPU I.e IBM power and they aren't all that quick compared to an FPGA.

Are you sure about that? There have definitely been times in the past when the NSA rented fab capacity from Intel.

Up to 2008, 100% sure. AFAIK, they were doing primarily mixed mode analogue as this stuff is harder to do inside an FPGA. I worked for one of their nefarious suppliers for a bit.

Wikipedia says they have their own fab at Ft Meade. Or is this just a super secure division of an Intel fab?

Intel run it. AFAIK it was used to produce rad hardened and analogue stuff only. Nothing fancy.

If Motorola and Cisco and other big tech firms have no trouble producing ASICs, why would the NSA? You don't need to fab them yourself, you just need designers and a fab partner.

If you've ever worked in the defence industry, you will find out that you can't just ship designs to be fabbed. They are strictly information controlled and classified. That favours FPGAs as the process is externalised and the design is secure. ASICs cost at least a few million to get off the ground and you're not guaranteed your design will yield on the first run. Bringing the process in house only makes sense for very specialist hardware (think mixed mode and rad hardened) as these can't be got off the shelf.

When I worked for one of these orgs, we had a PowerPC rad hardened device which was based on a 603 and that was nearly $100k a unit in quantities of 50 and that was an off the shelf design. The one ASIC we had which was mixed mode (analogue front end and digital back end) was $25k a pop in quantities of 1000 on top of tooling and design costs of $7m.

Just doesn't add up. If its on the ground or can be bought in milspec form, it'll get used. Altera/Xilinx do this for a reasonable spend. Expect to be killed by an FPGA I programmed one day :(

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