Quote Originally Posted by EE_ View Post
Why do you think there's never been a stink made by the US government about bitcoin...they've been in on it all along.
This is fascinating speculation. It has many implications and possibility.

A while ago, I read a blog which presented the case that NSA created bitcoin and purposely used flawed encryption so they could track its use.
... these complex mathematical coincidences are strong evidence that Bitcoin was not designed by a single lucky person – but by many extremely smart mathematicians and computer programmers over a period of several years. [Private entities] would not be likely to choose the NSA flawed encryption method. In other words, the strange design of Bitcoin has the fingerprints of the NSA all over it.
The blogger made his point, but I got to wondering why. I don't fully go for either his or your (EE_) logic, but yes I think they're in on it and I think I know why.

After 9/11/01, everyone asked why, oh why, we couldn't have known about the terrorists in time to stop them. "Follow the money," is the phrase we heard. We need to track terrorists transferring money around the world to know where they're going to hit. But Arabs have had an untraceable money transfer network in operation for over a thousand years which terrorists use. It works on trust and person-to-person contact. But it's slow and expensive. What if they could find an anonymous, instant, dirt-cheap way to transfer money around the world? If the terrorist thought it was anonymous and NSA knows it's not, the stage would be set.

And since Congress has been tipped off that they shouldn't hamper bitcoin, they just make noise and threats. It fits. And I'm not even opposed to it (since my credit card purchases and brokerage investments are surely very visible to NSA anyway).