ECDSA curve parameters in Bitcoin are standard ones, recommended by NIST. I wonder where they came from. Is there any rationale behind these particular constants, or they magically appeared out of nowhere, akin to dual_ec_drbg?

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This is like Goldman Sachs recommending stocks to their clients they know they are going to be selling short ...

Basically any NSA recommendations have lost ALL credibility, and they are not going to get it back any time soon, if ever. They have not been dealing in good faith and ALL trust in any of their algos, methods, hardware, math, keys, certificates, etc ... everything NSA (inlc. google and other compromised commercial proxies)  are now suspect.

They should now be considered the the national INsecurity Agency.

all of this aside, I think if the NSA had the ability to disrupt the security model of Bitcoin's fundamentals, they would have done it by now. Unless it is just a massive project to crash the world economy, force everyone onto cryptocurrency and only then start pwning the private keys of people they don't like. In which case, why at all sow any seeds of doubt now? Not convinced.

Well, I still think that as per the Android PRNG issue, people have lost their pocket change as a sacrifice to everyone elses improved understanding of what is and isn't possible. Someone pointed out that the politics of currency isn't the NSA's raison d'etre, and that remains so until and if they are assigned a cryptocurrency takedown notice form the people who do make it their business. In the meantime, I'm glad that the discourse about the ECDSA vulnerabilities is playing out amongst the core development team, and if we need to change things, then change they will. It's not the ideal circumstances to have to alter the cryptographic underpinnings, but I don't know how else we could have expected such a change in perspective to play out. It could be worse than a single government source of (still not definitively a) compromise.

I can assure you folks aren't monitored quite like you'd imagine, not everyone at least.

Lots of discussion about broken crypto on here, some really good stuff with legitimacy too. Some of it is a little off the mark but close.

Best advice I will give, which is what I've been taught and live by: Presume none of your encryption matters, with regard to what you store and transmit.

Also, presume what's being suggested to use as the best encryption, is a bit of a double ruse. On one hand, some folks will look at that and think "they want me to use this.. because there's a way around it.. so I won't use it and will look at something else" ... which could also be equally compromised. The old salesman's technique, park the sedan next to the sports car and tell the guy all the reasons why he doesn't want the sports car. He'll buy the sports car.

There is a very simple reason. Bitcoin was created to be a substitute for gold. The US government has a lot of computing power but run out of gold. They owe a lot of gold to other nations but will never pay it back in gold.

If you're expecting folks to just come out and say they work for various departments and this is what they're basing their knowledge/experience on, I doubt you'll ever see that answer. I wish I could help you more. I'm sure many of us here wish they could do more.


Absolutely agree. This is just the tip of the green stem in the corner of the field. The briar has yet to fully engulf it, but it will; it's going to be far worse. Not necessarily in our lifetime, it's been about 100 years in the making.

If folks do enough research they'll find pieces of the puzzle and can loosely see that over the past century and a half,  'idiocy' of the US political system, and how a lot of international relations have panned out,  was always planned to look like a circus spectacle, all the  while pulling off one of the greatest slights of hand of all present history. This isn't even conspiracy talk from the looney bin.. I've trolled this forum, and many others, and lots of people have pieces to the puzzle, some have put a few of them together. The reality is most don't realize the big picture, everyone is caught up in small political wars and finger pointing.

Some folks would say Orwel's 1984 was a great novel. Others would say, it was the subtle leaking of a greater plan. Those who understood and heeded the warning signs would know what to expect, and if desired, when to leave.

Zoom out, zoom really far out, and look at the big picture. This doesn't necessarily help this discussion, it's not meant to be the words of an oracle. I just hope it piques interest and gets people to dig. If folks are really curious, and some of you are good at digging, I suggest continue digging.

Schneier has been emphatically telling whoever will listen lately to avoid elliptic-curve crypto engineering, or to increase the key sizes, due to math tricks involved he believes are probably ripe for mathematical breakthroughs. Most ECC is patented anyways by Certicom and requires licensing. The NSA has been pushing ECC lately as well in their Suite B protection which is probably Suite (B)ackdoored so they can spoof signatures and handshakes.

Still I doubt the NSA would want anything to do with bitcoin besides use it to pay their own spies in Iran and Russia."Comrade, here is your 1000BTC for political blackmail purposes. Please get picture of Putin wearing lipstick passed out drunk in a dress".

I also don't buy the 'NSA recommends this so it must be a trick to get us to use something else!'. Whatever NIST recommendations are is what is put into commercial software/hardware blackboxes.