Topic: Much talk about the NSA, but is the NSA really a threat to bitcoin ? (Read 794 times)

You're thinking of the FBI. The NSA exists to keep tabs on global political trends and stuff that happens big-picture beneath the surface. The NSA doesn't give a shit about SR and DPR and small-scale tax evasion. The NSA was *created* to keep an eye on the CIA.

The CIA, I have on good authority, were very involved on the drug trade on SR, and the FBI bust was very bad for them. The NSA-CIA rivalry is well-documented and goes back decades. If I'm to side with one, it's the NSA. All this recent news media coverage on the NSA is fishy to me. The media has long been considered to be connected with CIA operations, domestically and abroad. The NSA has been the shining example of a gov branch that doesn't sully its name by being involved with financing the war on drugs, terrorism, and "overthrowing democracies and setting up dictators" to quote one fictional Hannibal Smith. That was always the CIA. Snowden, as a *contractor* who used to work for the CIA directly... The possibility of him as a CIA operation attacking the NSA's credibility is not a possibility to ignore. Certainly, connections between Putin and the CIA are supportable. (And I generally like Putin in many ways. I don't know where any unbiased truths actually are.) If you assume that the FBI couldn't blunder into DPR without parallel construction assistance from the NSA, whether noble or just as a fuck-you to the CIA, the pattern of attack and revenge emerges.

Is any of that true? I have no clue. Maybe somehow the CIA are the good guys (though I'm not sure about the possibility of that). Maybe they both are equally awful and the NSA has kept the secret longer. It doesn't matter. The point is, we don't know what we know. The same media we blasted a year back for reenactment coverage and false journalism around the Boston marathon and the elementary school attacks, we now take their journalism as gospel because it fits what we want to hear. We jump from one "god" whose authority and intentions we don't question, to another. If the media is accurate, Snowden is a hero. If my tinfoil example above is accurate, he's... Just another distraction, and the CIA finds it useful for us to distrust the NSA input on cryptography. Regardless, he's not a traitor as the statists say, but beyond that, what do we know?

Anyway, I'm not worried about the CIA or the NSA. Despite setbacks, technology and evolution will progress, humans will evolve, and there will always be enough good brilliant humans to offset the groups of brilliant misguided ones. The latter are by definition less intelligent and therefore disadvantaged.

NSA probably doesn't like Bitcoins because of possible tax evasion.

However, if you look at it the other way - blockchain based currency is perfect for them because of its permanent unerasable storage mechanism, so all they need to do is force Googla, Apple, Microsoft and alike to track us all a bit more, so that they can link BTC addresses to a person - once they have that info BTC is better then USD, from NSA's perspective.

The only thing NSA would hate is real functional BTC laundry service.

This raises interesting political questions. It's likely many Governments will buy Bitcoin to position themselves in good light if Bitcoin does take off, also many institutions are known to be investing heavily in Bitcoin. So attacking Bitcoin would be more dangerous politically if for example China was heavily invested.

Could they attack Bitcoin? They have around $10 billion in funding per year, so they could easily design their own ASIC and 51% attack, the loss in confidence would then cause permanent price collapse, they could then keep attacking with each new proof of work introduced.

However would they be allowed to? Probably not.

Also as time goes on the window for attack grows ever smaller. It will cost the NSA more and more the longer they wait, and it's unlikely they will ever have the right or will to do it. In a few years even a budget of many billions will not be enough to 51% attack.

Fuck the NSA. They just like snooping around. I see them as group of stalkers who got a badge to justify their stalking. Think about it, they are a bunch of pervert, they hack people's webcam and mobile so they can peek at people in their most private surrounding. They probably have a wank when they are peeking us, when we are getting naked or have bath or shower. 

I have noticed many threads about the NSA related to bitcoin, many people seem to think the NSA and their hacking abilities pose a threat to bitcoin, some people seem to fear the NSA it seems. (or they just spreading FUD, where the Fear suppose to come from the NSA)

But is this fear justified, does the NSA really want to destroy bitcoin ? I mean if bitcoin is deemed a threat to the national security of the USA , does the US government need to hack it in order to destroy it ? They could just ban it outright could they not ? like they banned the ownership of gold in the past, when gold became a threat to the USD.

I tend to think the NSA likes bitcoin, like a lot of shady deals are now being done in bitcoin instead of cash. the NSA with their dragnet surveillance in the USA and all other countries allied to the USA can pretty much track who is sending bitcoins to whom, much easier for the government then to track who is paying large sums of cash in suitcases.