Lead bitcoin developer invited into CIA headquarters

http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=6652.0

by mike_esspe • 15 years ago

78 43 15 years ago

bitcoin.org

kiba2• 15 years ago

Should be "Lead Bitcoin Developer Invited into CIA Headquarters"

koin• 15 years ago

into the belly of the beast

sgornick• 15 years ago

Good to see something happening. I hadn't seen anything regarding Bitcoin on HN for about 24 hours and was starting to get worried.

trotsky5• 15 years ago

I hate to whine, but has an editor/admin looked at the volume of bitcoin submissions and any possible voting block behavior on the stories? A new bitcoin story seems to have shown up every few days for the past several months, with many of the same posters adding support in the comments every time.

Let's take this story for example. Let's frame it in general terms. A leader of an open source project is going to be speaking in a few months at a meeting that isn't open to the public, and he doesn't suggest he'll be presenting anything new.

Would this be newsworthy on HN for any normal project? Highly unlikely. Many of the bitcoin stories seem to be similar - press about bitcoin that offers nothing that hasn't been said here 100 times.

If the voting and interest is organic, then fine, so be it. But maybe somebody could take a look and see. There is an obvious incentive to certain speculators holding bitcoin to hype it as much as possible in an attempt to fuel the already extreme fluctuations that occur in its trading.

ghshephard• 15 years ago

I vote up a lot of the BitCoin Stories - wish there were more of them. While I hold 48.5 BTC, I don't believe I'm speculating/hyping it.

The CIA story didn't have much in it - couldn't be bothered to upvote it, but I can understand why others might - The CIA is interested in BitCoins. How cool is that.

erikpukinskis• 15 years ago

Would this be newsworthy on HN for any normal project?

I think it would be newsworthy if Linus was invited to speak at the CIA, or Andy Rubin, so: yes.

But maybe somebody could take a look and see.

What sort of pattern would qualify as not organic to you? I didn't vote up this story, but I'm happy to see it on the front page because I think Bitcoin is probably the most fascinating hack I've seen in several years.

Full disclosure: I own 154.74 BTC, although I couldn't care less about it as an investment. I just think it's cool technologically and politically.

mrb2• 15 years ago

Imagine HackerNews existed in 1992, as an NNTP newsgroup, and reported stories about this new thing called the World Wide Web being developped by Berners-Lee. I wasn't there at the time, but I imagine that only a fraction of the people at the time understood the revolutionary capabilities of this technology, while most were indifferent, and perhaps, like you, a little annoyed if the WWW was repeatedly mentioned to you in a short timespan.

Of course we all know how significant the WWW turned out to be to human society in the next decade and later.

Well, IMHO, what is happening today in 2011 with Bitcoin is the same thing. When I first read about Bitcoin, I skimmed over it, thought it was a scam. Then it was mentioned to me again, and again, became curious, stumbled upon the white paper by accident (http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf), read it, and was amazed by the concepts, the design, the suprising capabilities offered by its clever use of cryptography. This is so different and so far ahead from any monetary system that exists today that I, for one, believe that Bitcoin is potentially as revolutionary as the WWW. The very fact we see so many submissions from different people about Bitcoin (the top 8 submission at http://www.google.com/search?q=+site:ycombinator.com+bitcoin are from 7 different HN accounts, so it is not like there is a core group of fanboys spamming HN), and the fact that HN is a community with a high concentration of smart folks, shows that Bitcoin is certainly onto something... In fact, a seemingly overabundance of submissions for a specific technology is exactly one thing I would recognize as a sign of the potentially next WWW-level revolutionary tech...

Mark my words. Come back to this post 10 years from now :-)

T_S_• 15 years ago

Don't waste your time on them. They just want to reduce the costs of carrying around cash in black satchels. Get feedback from the NSA instead.

Retric• 15 years ago

There have been some suggestions that the CIA backed Tor so they may be willing to support such systems.

PS: According to Wikipedia Tor Originally sponsored by the US Naval Research Laboratory,[10] so that's another group that's probably worth looking into.

pointillistic• 15 years ago

The elephant in the room is that in addition to the obvious upside these platforms are ripe for money laundering.

tabsa2• 15 years ago

Current currencies "cash platform" already provides such services. Also offshoring, lobbying, loopholes in the law and creative accounting.

There is no elephant here.

eli• 15 years ago

Pretty tough to send cash anonymously over the internet.

rhizome• 15 years ago

History tells us that the CIA doesn't necessarily mind.

ww520• 15 years ago

CIA would be a big user of bitcoins. There are a few operations that they don't want the money to be traced.

mike_esspe• 15 years ago

Cached copy, if forum is unresponsive: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome...

waterlesscloud2• 15 years ago

My guess is that some of the best cryptographers and mathematicians you've never heard of will be in the audience for that presentation.

eof2• 15 years ago

Have to imagine they are heavily mining bitcoin as well.

calebmpeterson• 15 years ago

To what end? Given that they're funded by the US govt. if they need more cash, they can just ask Uncle Sam to warm up the printer...

Seriously though, why would mining bitcoins benefit them?

sliverstorm• 15 years ago

Best way to control a currency you can't print is to own most of it.

eof2• 15 years ago

Let me answer your question with a question: Is it completely unlikely that having a large stash of bitcoin is going to be useful to them?

I think the answer is a resounding 'no.' If it put myself in their shoes, with unlimited resources, I would be like "throw a couple teraflops at this ASAP."

danek• 15 years ago

"I think the goals of this project are to create a better currency, create a more competitive and efficient international payment system, and give people more direct control over their finances. And I don't think any of those goals are incompatible with the goals of government."

Aren't these goals are completely at odds with the goals of the government, or do I read too much Chomsky?

sitkack• 15 years ago

I don't think the government would deny either.

bitwize• 15 years ago

If the government doesn't have a backdoor in allowing them to track and/or tax every transaction, you bet your ass it's incompatible with the goals of government!

wladimir• 15 years ago

With bitcoin, they do. No backdoor, but the entire transaction log is public. It's even easier for the tax man because they don't have to query data from banks. Bitcoin is not a tax avoidance scheme and never meant to be.

The sooner they come up with a legal way to tax bitcoins, the better it is for business adoption, I guess...

SkyMarshal• 15 years ago

More like, it's completely at odds with the BIS and their private reserve bank international monetary system. If bitcoin manages to disrupt that, hoo boy will we be living interesting times then.

mieses• 15 years ago

boring. this business model is well known.

1 create a popular encrypted system the CIA can't see inside of. 2 get invited into CIA headquarters. 3 [redacted] 4 retire.

rms• 15 years ago

3) is known as an offer you can't refuse.

richardw• 15 years ago

I'd say their primary interest is knowing how to watch payment flow. They'll develop ways to discover patterns in payment and deduce who is part of what network. Unlikely to disrupt, rather find ways to leverage it.

kurige• 15 years ago

... and he never came out. </obligatory-joke>

Lead bitcoin developer invited into CIA headquarters

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