{"id":43563,"date":"2025-08-22T12:16:31","date_gmt":"2025-08-22T12:16:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=43563"},"modified":"2025-08-22T12:16:31","modified_gmt":"2025-08-22T12:16:31","slug":"cornell-professor-claims-bitcoin-was-an-nsa-creation-expert-pushes-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=43563","title":{"rendered":"Cornell Professor Claims Bitcoin Was An NSA Creation\u2014Expert Pushes Back"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

A fresh round of speculation about Bitcoin\u2019s origins erupted this week after Cornell professor Dave Collum told Tucker Carlson that \u201cthe first paper on crypto was written by three NSA guys,\u201d advancing a theory that US intelligence seeded BTC to acclimate the public to a future of central bank digital currencies. \u201cI\u2019d release the crypto. I\u2019d have guys pumping it\u2026 let them debug the networks\u2026 and then I\u2019d say, \u2018Okay, it was fun. We\u2019ll take it from here,\u2019\u201d Collum argued<\/a>, suggesting that elites would never permit an uncontrolled monetary network to survive.<\/p>\n

Was Bitcoin Created By The NSA?<\/h2>\n

Swan Bitcoin\u2019s daily program No Second Best devoted its August 21 episode to the claim\u2014and to the broader idea that Bitcoin, stablecoins, and US public debt are entangled in ways that conspiracy narratives miss. Host Hurley framed<\/a> the NSA-origin story as a persistent myth that \u201cjust won\u2019t die,\u201d then pivoted to a different \u201cTrojan horse\u201d dynamic: dollar stablecoins absorbing short-term Treasury issuance and, in some issuers\u2019 cases, directing part of the resulting income toward Bitcoin.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile Tucker and Collum are busy chasing CIA shadows,\u201d Hurley said, \u201cthere is a real Trojan horse at play. But it\u2019s not Bitcoin being used by governments. It\u2019s stablecoins and US debt quietly paving the way for Bitcoin\u2019s rise.\u201d
\nAt the core of Collum\u2019s argument is a real historical artifact: \u201cHow to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash,\u201d a 1996\u201397 paper credited to three researchers in the National Security Agency\u2019s Cryptology Division.<\/p>\n

Its survey of e-cash concepts predates Bitcoin by more than a decade, and it has long fueled speculation about official-sector interest in digital cash architectures. But existence is not authorship. The paper does not propose Bitcoin\u2019s design, and nothing in the public record links the NSA to the creation of the Bitcoin protocol released by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto<\/a> in 2008\u201309.<\/p>\n

Collum, however, insisted that elite families and institutions would never allow a truly free monetary protocol to dethrone them. \u201cDo you think the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds are going to hand it over to Max Keiser and Michael Saylor? I don\u2019t think so.\u201d<\/p>\n

For him, Bitcoin is not an escape route but a setup. \u201cIf I were smart and I were going to bring in central bank digital currency, which is an authoritarian nightmare, I would do it the way they did. I\u2019d release the crypto. I\u2019d have guys pumping it. I\u2019d have guys supporting it. I\u2019d let them debug the networks and the kinks and acclimate people to it. And then I\u2019d say, \u2018Okay, it was fun. We\u2019ll take it from here.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Hurley countered that logic head-on. \u201cHere\u2019s the thing, it already is happening. The protocol doesn\u2019t ask permission. It doesn\u2019t need approval from the Rockefellers or the Rothschilds or any US administration. For one thing, there\u2019s absolutely no evidence that the CIA or the NSA or any other three-letter agency created Bitcoin.\u201d
\nHe also dismissed linguistic conspiracy arguments outright: \u201cIf this was the NSA\u2019s super-secret project, why would they hide the clue in plain sight inside a Google-translatable Japanese name?<\/p>\n

To twist Satoshi Nakamoto into CIA code is peak conspiracy brain.\u201d The name-as-clue trope\u2014often summarized as \u201cSatoshi = intelligence, Nakamoto = central origin, therefore \u2018central intelligence\u2019\u201d\u2014 collapses under scrutiny. Satoshi is a common Japanese given name meaning \u201cintelligent,\u201d \u201cwise,\u201d or similar, while Nakamoto is a routine surname typically glossed as \u201ccentral origin\u201d or \u201cone who lives in the middle.\u201d That is linguistics, not cryptography, and it doesn\u2019t imply an intelligence-agency signature.<\/p>\n

More importantly, even if a government employee had once explored ideas adjacent to e-cash, BTC\u2019s governance and code availability undercut the \u201ctrapdoor\u201d thesis. Bitcoin Core is open-source software published under the permissive MIT license; the codebase, development process, and consensus rules are public, auditable, and forkable. No hidden \u201coff switch\u201d has ever been demonstrated in 16 years of global adversarial testing\u2014an empirical record that matters more than origin mythology.<\/p>\n

Is Bitcoin A Trojan Horse?<\/h2>\n

Where the Swan episode shifted the conversation was in connecting stablecoin market structure to US debt issuance\u2014an institutional story rather than a clandestine one. Hurley highlighted the irony: \u201cThe real theft of liberty is happening through fiat itself. Your savings diluted by 7, 10, or 15 percent a year\u2014that\u2019s state-sanctioned financial slavery. Cash might give you short-term transactional privacy, but Bitcoin gives you long-term sovereignty.\u201d<\/p>\n

In July, President Donald Trump signed the GENIUS Act<\/a>, the first US federal stablecoin law, which requires 1:1 reserves in cash and short-term Treasuries (among other disclosures and licensing provisions). That legal architecture explicitly channels payment-stablecoin collateral into highly liquid dollar assets.<\/p>\n

That pipeline already exists in practice. Tether<\/a>\u2014by far the largest dollar stablecoin\u2014reported in its latest attestation that it has become one of the largest holders of US Treasury bills, with a triple-digit-billion exposure, and it also holds Bitcoin directly on its balance sheet. Company disclosures suggest Bitcoin remains a single-digit percentage of reserves, but a disproportionately large driver of profits during rising markets. Those facts support, without proving, the show\u2019s thesis that the dollar-stablecoin complex can act as a conduit from Treasury coupons to Bitcoin accumulation.<\/p>\n

Preston Pysh pushed the point on stage at the Baltic Honeybadger conference two weeks ago, arguing that short-duration Treasury issuance has found a \u201cnatural buyer\u201d in stablecoin issuers who prefer minimal duration risk\u2014and that some issuers then \u201csweep\u201d income into Bitcoin, reinforcing the asset\u2019s monetization over time. Whether this represents a \u201cTrojan horse\u201d for Bitcoin or simply rational treasury management by private firms is debatable, but the mechanism he sketched is plainly visible in public filings and market behavior.<\/p>\n

Hurley concluded: \u201cBitcoin is the Trojan horse, but for freedom. The endgame<\/a> is Bitcoin itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

At press time, BTC traded at $113,045.<\/p>\n

\"Bitcoin<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A fresh round of speculation about Bitcoin\u2019s origins erupted this week after Cornell professor Dave Collum told Tucker Carlson that \u201cthe first paper on crypto was written by three NSA guys,\u201d advancing a theory that US intelligence seeded BTC to acclimate the public to a future of central bank digital currencies. \u201cI\u2019d release the crypto. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3,4,5],"class_list":["post-43563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-crypto","tag-doge","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43563\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}