Bitcoin advocate Nic Carter has come out to reiterate his assist for the theory that the United States National Security Agency (NSA) had one thing to do with the creation of Bitcoin (BTC).
On Sept. 15, Iris Energy co-founder Daniel Roberts seemingly revived the decade-old theory on X after posting screenshots of a 1996 paper titled “How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash.”
The paper is likely one of the first identified discussions of a Bitcoin-like system, which proposes utilizing public-key cryptography to permit customers to make nameless funds with out revealing their identification.
The footer notes present the analysis paper was “prepared by NSA employees.” Sources included cryptography professional Tatsuaki Okamoto, who co-invented the Okamoto–Uchiyama public key cryptosystem in 1998.
On Sept. 21, Carter, a accomplice at Castle Island Ventures, doubled down his assist for the notion, stating, “I actually do believe this,” earlier than including:
“I call it the ‘Bitcoin lab leak hypothesis.’ I think it was a shuttered internal R&D project, which one researcher thought was too good to lay fallow on the shelf and chose to secretly release.”
Carter has truly held the theory for a number of years, proposing again in 2020: “If Bitcoin was written by NSA cryptographers as a monetary bioweapon, if you will, and the code escaped those sensitive confines… does that make it a virus… that escaped from a lab?”
In 2021, he stated, “The only decent thing the NSA ever did from the world was let bitcoin leak from the lab.”
I truly do consider this. I name it the bitcoin lab leak speculation. I believe it was a shuttered inner R&D undertaking which one researcher thought was too good to put fallow on the shelf and selected to secretly launch https://t.co/qXJkQTciSK
— nic carter (@nic__carter) September 21, 2023
However, he went on to say that this doesn’t indicate that the United States authorities secretly controls all of the Bitcoin, one other theory that usually piggybacks on the Bitcoin/NSA conspiracy theory, which suggests the NSA created a backdoor to the Bitcoin code.
“In my version of this made-up idea, the researcher did it without permission of the NSA and chose to leave the coins behind so as to preserve his anonymity.”
“There’s a ton of other circumstantial evidence which supports this [theory],” he added.
Meanwhile, some customers drew consideration to one of many cryptography lecturers, Tatsuaki Okamoto, listed within the 1996 paper, suggesting the identify sounds similar to Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin.
“The name could have been used as inspiration for Satoshi. That’s not really a critical part of the theory, though,” Carter mentioned.
Related: This is how Satoshi Nakamoto envisioned crypto working
Meanwhile, Matthew Pines, director of intelligence at cybersecurity agency Krebs Stamos, believes it was probably a “cross-fertilization of NSA crypto nerds and cypherpunk nerds,” including:
“I suspect Satoshi (or at least his/their close intellectual collaborators) has close NSA work associations — but I don’t think Bitcoin itself or the white paper were officially sanctioned.”
Former Goldman Sachs government Raoul Pal has beforehand shared his personal theory. In an interview with Impact Theory earlier this yr, he said:
“I think the U.S. government and the U.K. government invented it… which is the NSA and the GCHQ in the U.K., who are the two world centers of cryptography.”
In August, Cointelegraph did a deep dive into the conspiracy theory and interviewed former NSA cryptanalyst Jeff Man, who mentioned that, whereas it was “feasible” that the NSA may have created Bitcoin as a way to collect intelligence about its enemies, it’s extremely uncertain.
However, Man concluded that even when they did, it’s seemingly we’ll by no means discover out the actual story behind the world’s hottest digital asset till it doesn’t matter anymore.
