A 1996 research paper from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has recently generated a lot of discussion in the cryptography community. People are starting to wonder if the NSA was responsible for creating Bitcoin. In fact, the NSA dossier and the Bitcoin white paper have a lot in common. A closer examination, however, points to a closer resemblance to centralized Chaumian models discussed before.
Finding Bitcoin's Supposed Origins: From the NSA's Vaults to Satoshi's Vision
There are rumors that the NSA, the intelligence division of the US Department of Defense, may have been responsible for creating Bitcoin, whose creation is widely believed to have been the work of the enigmatic Satoshi Nakamoto. We'll get into this narrative's earlier emergence shortly even if it isn't new. For the time being, it's important to note that this idea has acquired popularity on the social media platform X, along with the NSA's report.
The NSA created Bitcoin, right? Roberts Daniel pondered. 'How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash' paper from 1996. One of the sources is "Tatsuaki Okamoto." Who else could sit on a million coins in secrecy. Oh, and SHA256 was created by them?
 |
| the NSA study that is trending on social media. |
The NSA study, published on June 18, 1996, was written by Laurie Law, Susan Sabett, and Jerry Solinas and explores online transactions, cryptography, and digital signatures. It implies a distributed architecture with the capability of "untraceability." Even offline usage are included by the suggested "electronic coin". There was a rush of responses to Roberts' remarks on X.
Computer scientist and financial cryptographer Ian Grigg clarified that it was "just an old NSA paper." It caused a minor stir and was made to explain to the IC how digital money, such as Chaum blinded money from the 1990s, operated at the time. The use of Chaucerian terminology like "Mint" and "Anonymous Electronic Cash" is a hint.
Cryptographer Adam Back added his two cents, saying, "That seems more like a chaum ecash variation. i.e., centalized electronic cash, unrelated to bitcoin. Early in the 1980s, David Chaum popularized the concept of digital money by writing a paper titled "Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments" in 1982.
The NSA document that is gaining attention is not brand-new; CCN.com covered it years ago. Despite new versions appearing in 2021, the article was archived on June 6, 2018. The NSA's development of the SHA256 cryptographic hash function was also mentioned in the article. The 1996 document was not included in the CCN article headlined "4 Reasons to Believe the Deep State (or the NSA) Created Bitcoin," which was published on June 6, 2019, by the news outlet.
Even before Bitcoin was created, in 2005, disclosures showed that the NSA and Pentagon had invested heavily in supercomputers and huge data centers in Maryland and Utah. In Fort Meade, Maryland, the NSA had built a supercomputing hub for $895.6 million by 2011, which drew more than 60 MW of power at first. According to reports, the Utah data center has about 100,000 square feet set aside for computers, while the Fort Meade NSA complex reportedly has 70,000 square feet of technical space.
 |
| The enormous NSA data facility in Utah and the multimillion-dollar computing hub in Fort Meade, Maryland (seen on the left). |
In addition to these technological marvels, in 2013 the NSA allegedly tracked bitcoin users. Whistleblower Edward Snowden and a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request were responsible for this disclosure. According to reports, the NSA used its Xkeyscore program, which can identify a user's Internet Protocol address, to track bitcoin enthusiasts. This operation was run via the "MONKEYROCKET" program.
The "MONKEYROCKET" service, dubbed a "non-Western Internet anonymization service," used "full take" surveillance. The NSA refused to comment when The Intercept requested a statement from them. Additionally, there are rumors that this software was a key factor in the closure of the Liberty Reserve exchange, which was shut down by US federal prosecutors in May 2013 in accordance with the Patriot Act.
But because history is cyclical, the 1996 NSA report is currently trending on social media and attracting the attention of crypto influencers. Nic Carter responded to Roberts' NSA post on X by saying, "I actually do believe this." "I refer to it as the Bitcoin lab leak theory. I believe it was an abandoned internal R&D project that one researcher decided to covertly leak because she thought it was too excellent to sit on the back burner.
"This doesn't imply the U.S. government controls all the Satoshi coins in secret, BTW," Carter said. In my interpretation of this made-up story, the researcher carried out his experiment without the NSA's consent and opted to leave the money behind in order to maintain his anonymity. The NSA study makes reference to Tatsuaki Okamoto, a renowned cryptographer employed by Japan's NTT. Over 23,000 scholarly publications have cited Okamoto's groundbreaking work so far.
What do you think about the rumors between Bitcoin and the NSA? Is it a reasonable hypothesis or just a wild guess? Please share your thoughts with us. Post your thoughts in the comments section.