can nsa steel my bitcoin if i can't turn off TMP 'trust computing"?
It's not completely clear what capabilities exist with which manufacturer's implementations of a TPM chip.
TPM is kind of neat in some ways, and provides some capabilities which really could be useful to more advanced distributed crypto-currency solutions (to my way of thinking) but they are opaque by their nature and by the nature of how design and manufacture of chips tend to happen these days. There is a pretty neat vid of someone grinding down one of these chips to have a deeper look inside floating around. Very few people have the time and skill to do this kind of investigation unfortunately. Even more unfortunate is that it is necessary.
Laymen, and even people who should know better, have a pretty dim understanding of certain things. One of them is that it is computer algorithms that do much of the analysis of bulk data collections. People tend to imagine other people looking through their data. Of course this is not true (usually) but there is not much difference between my looking at message, or writing a program to look at it. The big threat is that the data forms a dossier which can be leveraged to attack individuals in the future and thus provides a framework for enduring intimidation.
Another mis-conception which is more pertinent to this conversation is that whatever back-door methods which might exist would almost never be utilized, Doing so would be dangerous since it is possible (though very tedious and technical) to monitor what happens on one's network. If there are surreptitious means of leveraging the remote attestation related capabilities of a TPM chip and various other like techniques, it is likely that they would be used only under limited circumstances. e.g., the target is both very high value and situated in a location where it is unlikely that they have deployed their own packet capture infrastructure or logic analyzers on their hardware or whatever. I think that one of the many Snowden documents alluded to this issue though there have been so many that I've forgotten. Anyway, it's obvious enough to someone with an understanding of some of the technology.
edit: add missing sentence for clarity.
