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Comment by saraid216 | Hacker News Reader

I think Satoshi is the NSA. This is 99% because it would be the most entertaining result, and 1% actual reasoning ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6206086 ).

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It would be entertaining if the NSA could use blockchain data as an aid to cracking systems which employ SHA-256. It would be doubly fun if bitcoin was originally some off-the-cuff gamification scheme to help generate lookup tables for the NSA.

Are there any papers about practical (slash nefarious) uses one could make from the work put into the blockchain? I had the same thoughts as you recently, but don't have the background to imagine what's possible.

Each miner includes their own address and a nonce value in the work they are doing. Most of the work that goes into mining is generating failed hashes and is discarded by the client. Assuming a lack of mathematical attacks on sha 256, there isn't really anything nefarious to do with the published blocks.

I want a universe to exist where the answer to every question is based on its entertainment value.

Can we rule out the FBI?

Not smart enough?

I think so. Bitcoin is too global to be interesting to a domestic agency. It's more likely to be CIA.

If it's part of a policing effort, then it's obviously part of the UN, which according to Tim LeHaye, rules over the United States with an iron fist and is where the shadow government of totally-not-Jews would do exactly this kind of thing.

The only name I have for that is New World Order.

I would believe NSA before CIA. The FBI gets involved in the internet space, but it doesn't seem like the CIA does all that much.

You're not supposed to think the CIA does much. They're the actual spy agency; the whole "just a star on the wall at Langley" thing is CIA; you don't hear about their victories, and if you do, it's a failure of some kind. Stuxnet, for instance, was almost certainly CIA.

If Bitcoin is a targeted strike against China somehow (not completely impossible), then the CIA is the likeliest candidate. Otherwise, of the USGov national agencies, the NSA is most likely.

The FBI doesn't really get anything out of it. The only reason I can think of for the FBI to do it is for paying off informants anonymously. (And as I've pointed out before, if anyone's an expert on money laundering, it's the FBI.)

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