Why would a government have created bitcoin? -Paul Graham

[syxbits]

Cross posting this from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5547423:

I've long suspected bitcoin was created by a government. Bulletproof protocols usually require peer review, yet there have been zero leaks from the reviewers. Pools of crypto guys who don't leak stuff are usually employed by governments.
The part that puzzles me is why a government would do this. I can imagine several possibilities:

1. To finance their own black operations.

2. Because they thought digital currencies were inevitable, and they preferred bitcoin to some potentially more malevolent form. (Could bitcoin have been worse from a government's point of view?)

3. A friend suggested this: because they felt their currency would never become the standard reserve currency, and they felt it was better that no one's be if theirs couldn't be.

4. A variant of the above: the US did it because it seemed inevitable that the dollar would eventually lose its place as the standard reserve currency, and better to have it replaced by bitcoin that the yuan.

I realize some of these explanations are pretty far fetched, but so is an individual cooking up bitcoin as an intellectual exercise. Whatever the explanation of bitcoin's origin turns out to be, it will probably be pretty weird.

Anyone have opinions about these possible explanations, or other ones?

from

Paul Graham is an English programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist. He is known for his work on Lisp, for co-founding Viaweb, and for co-founding the Y Combinator seed capital firm.

[Severian]

I'm of the opinion that Bitcoin was created for the reason exactly as stated:

> You will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography.

Yes, but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new
territory of freedom for several years.

Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally
controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like
Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own.


http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09971.html

I'm also of the opinion that Bitcoin was probably created by someone with connections to the National Security State. But as prophetically said by J. Orlin Grabbe almost 20 years ago:

I additionally believed that one of our best defenses against the national security state was the perennial proclivity of clandestine organizations to piss off their own employees.

Bitcoin foreshadowed: “The End of Ordinary Money” by J. Orlin Grabbe (1995)

[Dabs]

At this point, who cares who came up with bitcoin or how? Government or some Japanese guy, it doesn't matter. The current code is open source and the protocol is defined. It uses cryptographic primitives that anyone can understand, or at least the smarter ones can understand it.