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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

This is ridiculously ahistorical: the early Bitcoin releases had all kinds of bugs in them[1], and there was a reasonably large enthusiast community looking at it for years before widespread adoption.

The US government doesn't need to burn coal to fund the clandestine services. They just put it in a budget line item whose contents are classified.

[1]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposu...

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FWIW the GP didn’t say US; there are many more intel orgs and govs desperate for money than the US.

North Korea seems to have been weaponizing it more aggressively than anyone at this point.

Sure; I'm curious which intelligence organization you (or the GP) think is most likely, then.

Keep in mind that (1) most intelligence organizations and clandestine services operate with even less oversight than the US's, and (2) all available evidence points to Satoshi Nakamoto being an L1 English speaker who was mostly active in Western European timezones.

If you're assuming that Satoshi was a spook, wouldn't the use of L1 English and Western timezones more likely to be an attempt to obfuscate?

This results in logical regress: any positive evidence that Nakamoto was a native-English speaking Westerner can be spun into negative evidence of an exceptionally advanced adversary.

In other words, it's "that's just what they want you to think!" logic. And that can be true, but it's not exceptionally convincing.

I find it no more convincing that the whole notion of Bitcoin being some kind of covert CIA (Mossad, FSB, ...) money laundering operation in the first place. If we're willing to go there in the first place, then we should admit that none of the obvious cues are likely to be truthful.

Sure, I can agree with that. That's an awfully long con!

And yet the Cia found it useful to sell cocaine. And that's in a country that has unlimited funding.

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