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Bitcoin lab leak: community revisits the NSA’s role

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Bitcoin lab leak: community revisits the NSA's role

A long-standing theory about the NSA’s involvement in the development of the first cryptocurrency has resurfaced in the community. On September 15, Iris Energy co-founder Daniel Roberts posted a screenshot of the agency’s 1996 article titled How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash.

The document is one of the earliest known discussions of a digital currency system, which proposed the use of public-key cryptography to anonymise transfers.

The notes to the report indicate that the research was “prepared by NSA staff.” Among the sources was cryptography expert Tatsuaki Okamoto, who in 1998 became a co-author of the Okamoto–Uyama public-key system.

The researchers enumerated four core components of the network:

All four elements are, in some form or other, implemented in the Bitcoin protocol. In addition, the authors frequently use terms such as “coins” and “tokens”.

The document also cites David Chaum, who is known in the crypto community as one of the earliest proponents of anonymous digital transactions. He developed the concept of untraceable electronic payments as early as 1982, long before the Internet’s widespread adoption.

Nick Carter, co-founder of Coin Metrics, affirmed his commitment to this theory.

“I actually do believe this. I call it the bitcoin lab leak hypothesis. It was probably a closed internal R&D project, which one researcher thought was too good to lay on the shelf and decided to release it,” he wrote.

According to Carter, this does not mean the U.S. government secretly controls Bitcoin. Most likely, an anonymous programmer released the blockchain without NSA’s permission, the expert added.

Carter has adhered to this theory for several years. In 2020 he voiced his thesis about a “lab leak,” suggesting the NSA could have been developing the first cryptocurrency as a “financial bioweapon”.

In 2021, the head of Coin Metrics called the alleged Bitcoin leak “the only decent thing the NSA ever did”.

The head of Krebs Stamos Security, Matthew Pines, also believes the developers of digital gold had close ties to the NSA, but did not receive direct orders to launch.

“Perhaps this is a mutual fertilization of NSA cryptobotanists and cipher punks,” Pines wrote.

Former Goldman Sachs executive and macro investor Raoul Pal, in an interview with Impact Theory, shared his own theory that the NSA and the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Centre collaborated on creating Bitcoin.

In August, Cointelegraph spoke with former NSA employee Jeff Man. He suggested a possible involvement by the agency in the first cryptocurrency as a “means of gathering information about its enemies.”

However, Man concluded that even if this theory is true, we will never know the true history of the world’s most popular digital asset.

In March 2018, Edward Snowden stated that the NSA was closely monitoring Bitcoin users.

Later, the co-founder of bitcoin.org and bitcointalk.org, under the pseudonym Cobra, said he did not trust American research into the first cryptocurrency, as the U.S. government had already infiltrated the project.

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