It would be a work of near-genius if that was what was going on.
Neat little alternative paradigm but that might just be one of many possible aspects or avenues for the NSA to put out a digital currency which they secretly control, be it through back doors or even simply by owning a controlling stake in the system.
We know that the crypto-algorithms used in Bitcoin were developed by US intelligence and we know that the NSA were researching crypto-currencies before most people had even heard of the internet. The more I think about it, the more likely I think it is that Bitcoin was created by a branch of NSA or something similar other than by some lone Japanese cryptographic maverick. As I have already said, these institutions have all the funding, all the expertise, all the resources, and all the motivation to continually be at the avant-garde of technological innovation.
Yeah, cryptography is without a doubt the provenance of intelligence agencies and
one person can't create something like that, frankly the idea that an anonymous individual created it is ridiculous. Simply doing enough testing to get a barely functional prototype out in the wild would require 1000s of man hours. I dismiss that notion out of hand.
Consider this, economic activity is a form of communication, it's how one segment of society signals its needs for resources to another segment of society. Just as we aren't going back to the pony express to communicate over distance we aren't turning our back on the idea of digital currency. It's going to happen, just as the widespread adoption of other major technical developments was a foregone conclusion, the only question is how. Clearly very few organizations have or can acquire the specialized resources necessary for such an effort, this means a state is behind it.
I've been thinking about why an intelligence agency would do such a thing and I think the theory I outlined is a good possibility. We've been misusing keynesianism by using our own domestic currency, for the reasons previously stated, as the world's reserve currency instead of instituting an objective international unit of account, such as Keyne's Bancor. This allows us to devalue our own currency while continuing to borrow yet defer the negative effects to the rest of the world by imposing very expensive external costs on the rest of the world's economic development via repressive economic scheming coupled with interventionism to counter resistance. This "guns and butter" principle is the basis of our economic philosophy for domination of global markets. However, the new financial system that began with the Nixon shock and came out of the demise of Bretton Woods is starting to break down and has resulted in an economic meltdown of epic proportion. This is causing big problems to emerge, politically speaking.
Introducing a new electronic international unit of account that is rigged with backdoors would solve a host of problems in the the economic and diplomatic arenas, yet allow US to maintain covert control if things go south.
So...it's gotta be a gag, however, Russia and China obviously didn't buy it because both banned cryptos as soon as they figured out what was going on.
Still digital currency isn't going away, and for this I am extremely interested in it and think it can be of use. All this doesn't mean that cryptos don't have all of the possibilities being imagined now. We just need one that is provably not compromised by any state agency.