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Comment by clamprecht | Hacker News Reader

As to #4, the United States is usually in denial about things like the dollar losing its status as the standard reserve currency. If a government is behind bitcoin, you have to give them credit for it.

Some people think the US government invented crack cocaine to fund CIA operations. Who knows...

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There's plenty of strong allegations of CIA drug involvement that you can just look up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_drug_traffic...

There would be one really good reason to invent a crack epidemic. Before that, there was a pretty strong anti-capitalist black nationalist movement. The men behind the curtain would not want that growing.

It would also increase the value of raw cocaine as a pre-cursor to highly valuable (from a cost vs. resale perspective) crack. The CIA being involved in, or simply turning a blind eye to, cocaine smuggling when the funds were to be used to fund things they viewed as necessary but those "idiots" in Washington wouldn't fund is not entirely looney. The angle of increasing the value of a fairly easily smuggleable drug is more compelling to me than a conspiracy targeting African-American communities in particular, like the CIA is run by some crude caricature of a southern grand dragon.

Agree. It was the FBI that was concerned with domestic black militants. The CIA just wanted a way to get cash anonymously to fund weapons-for-Iran and the Contras in Nicaragua.

If the CIA was behind Bitcoin, they would have done a better job with the unlinkability.

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