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Comment by pyre | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't it be grand if Satoshi was the NSA? ;-)

With the purpose being... to undermine the currency of their only source of income (the US government)? ;-)

After all the other 'realm of conspiracy theory' stuff that's come out, maybe the NSA just has their own agenda entirely.

People are finally starting to understand. Thank you for restoring my faith in humanity.

If we wanted to go down the conspiracy track, imagine if the NSA was behind it all. They are growing bitcoin large enough that tons of people rely on it, and also building up huge amounts of computing power in several large server farms. Then they can "switch the flip" - so to speak - and use a 51% attack to screw with the people who rely on it. While it wouldn't be very good to just crush the system as a whole (why would they have spent the effort in the first place?), they could selectively target their biggest nuisances by turning on their big building in Utah, take over the network for a few blocks and wipe out somebody's entire savings. Then they could shut off their building in Utah, and everything would chug along smoothly except for the one or two dudes they bankrupted.

While the "51% attack" [1] allows an adversary to control the block chain, she can only control which transactions to include and which not to include, so in the worst case bit-coin transactions can be (selectively) shut down.

Doing transactions on behalf of other users' accounts is not possible, as accounts are secured using public key cryptography (via elliptic curves) [2]. Only the creator of an account has the private key that allows her to sign valid transactions.

Nothing hinders the entity controlling the block chain to include invalid transactions that aren't properly signed, however all the other bitcoin clients in the network still verify the blockchain when downloaded, so those invalid transactions won't have a visible effect on users of the Bitcoin network.

[1] http://mineforeman.com/2012/12/10/want-to-destroy-bitcoin-i-...

[2] http://blog.ezyang.com/2011/06/the-cryptography-of-bitcoin/

I feel compelled to remark that they wouldn't do this just so they could flip the switch and screw over some people holding bitcoin. The NSA has easier ways of screwing people over.

Instead, as PG and others have hypothesized, the sovereign behind btc will have achieved a new worldwide currency system, that naturally, they will participate in, perhaps from a somewhat advantageous position (premined blocks etc).

The last 3 sentences of your post are a non-sequitur imho.

The right arm doesn't know what the left is doing.

Not actually as farfetched as that sounds. Keep in mind that alternative currencies are actually useful during economic downturns as a buffer to keep things afloat. Until now, such alternative currencies were extremely local: visitors to a place rarely know about its existence and aren't invited to participate.

Bitcoin, on the other hand, has been adopted in tandem with other currencies worldwide and has made international news. It may never succeed in some of its proponents' dreams of replacing fiat currency, but it's certainly visible enough to act as a global alternative currency during recessions.

I'd be legitimately surprised if Satoshi was not a U.S. government project.

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