I wonder why a government should pull this heist, while pretending to be ignorant. We know when someone was invited to the first bitcoin conference to explain bitcoin to the US government. So, the government was pretending. Even till date, some senators are still explaining bitcoin in the quest to pass the clarity bill.
For the thousandth time in this thread,
every person who works for the US government does not magically know what every other person in the US government knows.
The CIA is an intelligence agency that generally keeps its operations
totally secret even from the rest of the government--even from the rest of the CIA for that matter. You could be lunch buddies with a friend and have no idea what he is working on--because they are not supposed to share information there.
If the US government created the Internet (used to be called ArpaNet) and TOR, then it might have been involved in Bitcoin as well (either directly or indirectly). I mean, BTC came after the financial crisis of 2008. Perhaps, the government worked on Bitcoin, and then someone (or a group of people) decided to make it public. We will never know for sure. What's odd is the document the NSA published in 1996 which resembles the Bitcoin whitepaper. It was titled: "How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash". This raises a lot of questions.
At least, Bitcoin is in the hands of the community. Anyone can freely copy it, redistribute, or modify it. Neither the US government or any other government can dictate the rules of the game. It could have been worse, right? Without Bitcoin, we'd simply be stuck with centralized banking. Let's just hope Bitcoin never moves away from its intended purpose (banking for the unbanked). Just my two sats.
I agree with most of this, but I would only add context: Bitcoin was not the Moon Landing or the Manhattan Project. It did not require "The US Government" to create it, and most assume that Satoshi was
one man who coded on this project for a couple of years. There are thousands of workers within US intelligence agencies who could have done it, and they wouldn't have need much or even any permission to do it.
