The
MI5 has a long and proud(
) tradition of infiltrating anti-establishment and/or disruptive organisations - under the catch all of "national security".
They have managed to penetrate organisations as diverse as the environmental movement, the KGB, the IRA, the Labour Party etc etc - but my personal "favourite" was the way they managed, in the early 1970's, to entice
Jo Gormley onto the payroll. Jo Gormley had formerly been the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, the most powerful union in the UK, and one of the most powerful in Europe at the time - back in the day when we still had mines and unions still had real clout (NUM brought down Consevative Government in 1974).
As we all know Bitcoin/the blockchain is potentially a truly disruptive technology - and it strikes me as being a real threat to many existing vested interests.
This being the case I cannot imagine that it has not, therefore, received attention from (amongst others) MI5.
And having been looked at it has either been deemed that :-
a) BTC poses no threat - I can only see this as being the diagnosis if it is seen as being "on side" and reactionary by nature (comments ??) (leaving MI5 to concentrate on IS and "Save the NHS" activists). or
b) BTC
is a threat to the status quo.
My question is - is the open source nature of the protocol sufficient a protection if BTC is deemed a threat ? Or would the open source part be seen as a dream come true for TPTB ?
Would the counter measures undertaken by the intelligence services not come from within (the Bitcoin community) but from without ie. regulation/negative media representations etc. ? Or from within and without ? If from within - how ?
In what ways could the protocol be compromised to better serve existing vested interests and the large financial conglomerates ? And would this necessarily be at the expense of Bitcoins core values ? What are they BTW - in your opinion ?
Am I being paranoid ? Do I really need that Tails USB stick ?
So many questions, so little time
