14 years later, no one still knows who invented Bitcoin. Whether Len Sassaman, Hal Finney or Craig “Faketoshi” Wright – so far no conclusive evidence has been found for any of the candidates.
And now a rumor is making the rounds (again) that takes the whole thing to the extreme: The National Security Agency (NSA), the largest US secret service, is said to have invented Bitcoin. What’s true about the rumors?
Bitcoin and the NSA: Where do the rumors come from?
Under the title “how to make a mint: the cryptography of anonymous electronic cash” one was apparently published on June 18, 1996 document written that describes the basic principles of an electronic money system that shows striking similarities to Bitcoin. The authors are Laurie Law, Susann Sabett and Jerry Solinas, employees of the NSA’s Tech and Crypto Department.
In fact, the research paper deals with a large part of the features that are important for Bitcoin: the prevention of double spending, the use of public keys and private keys (here “secret key”) and also privacy features or pseudonymous transactions.
There is also an old friend in the bibliography: David Chaum, whose name comes up again and again when it comes to the invention of important cryptographic protocols that have found their way to Bitcoin.
In addition to him, there is another cryptography researcher whose name bears striking similarities to the inventor of Bitcoin: Dr. Tatsuaki Okamoto. Okamoto is the inventor of the Okamoto-Uchiyama public key system, an asymmetric encryption algorithm and the basis of secure Bitcoin transactions.
Does this mean the NSA invented Bitcoin?
The parallels between the NSA paper and the Bitcoin whitepaper cannot be denied. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the NSA is also behind Bitcoin. Confusing correlation with causation is a temptation that should not be succumbed to here.
In this context, the fact that the SHA-256 encryption mechanism goes back to the NSA is used as “proof” for the NSA Bitcoin theory. But the same applies here: It is only a possible indication, by no means proof.
It is not at all unusual for an invention to be based on existing ideas – it would be much more surprising if Satoshi Nakamoto had come up with all of his ideas on his own.
And if so?
Yes, what if the NSA is behind Bitcoin? The counter question would be: What would the US secret service gain from releasing a decentralized cryptocurrency into the world? Which also challenges the reserve currency status of the US dollar?
Just to take a few poor hodlers’ hard-earned satoshis out of their pockets with a big rug pull in a far-fetched future scenario? The effort would then be quite large.
A likely scenario is that one or more people already knew about or had read the NSA paper and based on it created the Bitcoin white paper. Whether there were personnel overlaps here can at best be speculated. The inspiration for the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto then went to the cryptography researcher Dr. Tatsuaki Okamoto is one of many possibilities.
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