Did Bitcoin leak from an American spy lab? | Hacker News Reader

Did Bitcoin leak from an American spy lab?

economist.com

35 pointsjdkee26 comments

Seems like a nothing burger. There's lots of prior art to Bitcoin - why should we scrutinize this paper in particular (as opposed to say, the work of Finney or Szabo)? The article gestures at a Japanese researcher being involved but that is a huge stretch. It also implies RSA "leaked" from GCHQ but I've never heard it suggested that that was a "leak" rather than an independent discovery (something that happens all the time in science[1], calculus being a popular example).

Whereas the suggestion that say, Robert T. Morris writing one of the first worms at a time when buffer overflows weren't widely understood was related to his father's position as a chief scientist at NSA - that has some legs to it, as far as "leaks" from NSA are concerned. (I neither believe nor disbelieve this, it's just as believable to me that he learned it from hacker lore or even independently discovered it. Afaict he's never given an interview about it [other than to law enforcement and Cornell staff], unfortunately. If you're reading this RTM or someone who knows RTM, please consider giving an interview or oral history on this incredibly historic topic. I think 'rtm is actually RTM but they haven't commented in a decade. And I can't be the first person to ask this of them, they must have their reasons.).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries

I dont support this theory.

I do, however, think that BTC is a useful construct for intelligence agencies. Esp. in the time where people thought it was anonymous and untraceable, and thus, used for illicit purchases and transfers.

There are limits to how much a tumbler can help you if you have just gotten. ransomware payment of a few million USD.

The eventual centralized giant crypto trading, buying selling sites make it even better for intelligence agencies.

Who could operate large minting farms and tumblers and sites for sell, buy, trade etc.

Personally think there’s a lot of weight behind the notion it was Paul LeRoux

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Le_Roux

Lol, really some random thug with a bit of technical skills?

Given that extensive rap sheet on wikipedia, I highly doubt this is the kind of guy with the self control to sit on his bitcoin while it was worth north of 8 figures.

> random thug with a bit of technical skills?

Did you actually read the wikipedia page? This is a highly intelligent person with no morals who orchestrated drug and arms smuggling cartel business on the entire planet for 15 years, murder, fraud and money laundering, of which some part is known, a big part of which he admitted to himself.

>Personally think there’s a lot of weight behind the notion it was Paul LeRoux

I'm glad that you elaborated why you think that's true, shame on me to expect anything.

Bitcoin was all about transparency, fighting fraud and crime, coming to consensus on the chronology of transactions in an organized manner. The last thing that criminal and drug smuggler wanted was an organized system that holds everyone accountable in a transparent and fraud/crime-free way.

It's too bad that Satoshi was as he put it "better with code than with words", because he didn't explain clearly what his goals and vision with Bitcoin were and because of that cypherpunks, crypto-anarchists and criminals overtook Bitcoin. And now Bitcoin has become the synonym for crime, drugs and the dark web. But I have to tell you police and law enforcement agencies like Bitcoin very much because of that aforementioned transaction transparency.

If you clicked onto the Wikipedia page I linked you should have been provided with enough information to infer my reasoning.

Shame on me to expect someone to click a source

I knew who that guy is....a criminal, a drug smuggler, an informant, his fellow criminals would call him a rat, a snitch....but your reasoning is; if he knew how to code and he coded crypto software therefore he could've been or must be Satoshi. That's not enough to proclaim someone the creator of like first working decentralized digital cash which was and is Bitcoin.

I think Satoshi was more probably an intellectual, an academic than some move-like drug kingpin.

Here's an interesting series about Le Roux.

https://magazine.atavist.com/the-mastermind/

I watched the series of this on Netflix! It was definitely a very good watch

See https://archive.ph/MTbIT

> No. But the theory is spreading online

Great so the economist is telling us with certainty something about the origin of Bitcoin.

This seems to be a disingenuous, agenda-riddled article. Declaring a conclusion up front with certainty, on a topic still not well understood, is anti-intellectual and has no business on hn.

It's an open secret that based on many crypto experts and the ones who knew Hal Finney personally that he's the original author or one of the original authors of Bitcoin [1],[2],[3]. Apparently coding has certain style and signature, and everyone coding style is different especially C program where freestyle is the norm, in which the original Bitcoin codes was originally written in C. It's also claimed by some experts that the original coding for Bitcoin code released by the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto has Hal's "fingerprint" all over it [3],[4].

[1] Hal Finney and Bitcoin's Earliest Days:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-MBB-26228

[2] Remembering Hal Finney on the 14th Anniversary of the First Bitcoin Transaction:

https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/01/12/remem...

[3] The Developer Who Discovered Bitcoin's Original Codebase, Jim Blasko:

https://hackernoon.com/the-developer-who-discovered-bitcoins...

[4] Uncovering Satoshi Nakamoto? A Look into the Techniques Used to Search for Bitcoins Creator:

https://blockchainindustrygroup.org/uncovering-satoshi-nakam...

Dave Kleimen is an interesting candidate for Satoshi, but I can't get by the way he died and yet didn't touch the vault of coins. It's hard to imagine... I don't think he had the technical chops for it either.

Len Sassaman is still the top candidate in my book.

> Len Sassaman is still the top candidate in my book.

I agree with this judgement.

Another hot candidate is in my opinion Nick Szabo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Szabo).

Adam Back is distant third after Len and Nick... I'd wager Satoshi is/was one of them!

This is nonsense. The original Bitcoin code was written in C++, not C which Hal always preferred to use, and Satoshi's style was very different to Hal's.

Conspiracy theorists appear not that creative

Devil's advocate: There's no rule that conspiracies have to be elaborate or out-of-this-world or anything like that.

If anything I'd say most conspiracies aren't half as interesting as conspiracy theorists make out.

A network of lizard people who drink the blood of babies but a single rambling man happens to know all the details and is always only 5 minutes away from publishing them? Makes sense

Systematic government lobbying in order to cause politicians to vote in the way that only benefits the rich but not the poor, while publicly focusing on minor issues so that major sweeping changes can be implemented without much notice? Well that seems unlikely.

Bitcoin leaked from an alien lab and was created from human tissue they sampled?

That would explain Covid vaccines. Think about it.

Bitcoin was created by AI of the future who sent itself into the past to create a currency that would fund the AI's creation.

it was less about the currency, more about the hardware.

now that we are on to language models, printing money is cheaper than mining it.

Creating hype around tokens with LLMs and hedging across virtual exchanges powered by artificial liquidity produced by cabal of token creators and exchange operators is apparently cheaper than accessing the physical world to create a physical token to appeal to millions of years of 'monkey have' instinct. Either way, it's monkeys all the way down.

And it did that by extending itself into the future first thereby entangling all time and space and creating a time chain block universe distributed computing architecture that can simulate any point along its existence which is coupled to multiple spacetime simultaneously since it exists everywhere moving forward. It’s also unfortunately an accelerant towards a black hole Due to incentivized maximum of using all spacetime coordinates for computronium-or-similar space filling requirements.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com