1996 NSA White Paper not the only piece of evidence that the NSA may have been involved in the creation of the Blockchain and Bitcoin
BY KEN SCHORTGEN
TheDailyEconomist.com
FEBRUARY 1, 2018
A number of months ago, we published an article that showed that the idea for cryptocurrencies actually occurred 12 years before the mysterious (and still unknown) Satoshi Nakamoto published his/her/their White Paper that led to the creation of the Blockchain and eventually the cryptocurrency that would become known as Bitcoin.
But there is also a second piece of evidence that has been known in the cryptocurrency sector for a number of years that adds credence to the theory that the NSA may have been at least partially involved in the creation of Bitcoin itself by the fact that an important piece of the source code used in the mining process is a long-standing NSA algorithm.
“It is true, the National Security Agency created part of the code for Bitcoin.
When you first hear that, it is pretty jarring. It seems like a smoking gun! Case closed, conspiracy theory proven. But the NSA creates a lot of cryptography code. Some of it works and is widely adopted.
The piece of the Bitcoin code created by the NSA is a hash function called SHA-256. SHA stands for Secure Hashing Algorithm. The hash is the expected outcome. An algorithm can be executed on a piece of data, and the output of that algorithm should match the hash. But you can’t figure out what the data was with just the hash. It only works in one direction. And there are enough different combinations that it is virtually impossible for any two pieces of data to create the same hash.
SHA-256 is not unique to Bitcoin and the NSA. It is used widely, including in SSL certificates to encrypt small data files. Even if someone changes one piece of the file, the hash also changes, and the receiving computer will recognize this by comparing the expected hash with the received hash. This prevents data from being intercepted and changed without detection before reaching its final destination.
That is also the premise behind how SHA-256 is used to create new blocks which represent a newly mined Bitcoin. If anyone tries to falsify any preceding block, the chain of blocks–or blockchain–is disrupted, and the hash will not match.
Yes, the NSA created a piece of the Bitcoin code. No, that is not as actually as sketchy as it might seem. – Daily Reckoning
Note the use of an NSA algorithm as part of the creation of a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is not definitive proof unto itself, however we do know from dissemination’s provided by the likes of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange (Wikileaks) that many of the NSA’s algorithms are and were infused in the coding, firmware, and hardware of most devices and systems to be able to provide themselves a backdoor into nearly every electronic platform.
The Rest…HERE
