Oh, what's this? Um, we, we've actually got, uh, Tucker Carlson calling into the show. Uh, Tucker Carlson, welcome, uh, welcome to Bitcoin Season Two. Everyone's talking about Bitcoin, of course.
You know, you can buy your Steak 'n Shake burger with it. You can even hold it in your retirement account. But where does Bitcoin come from, and who created it?
We're told that this mystical coder Satoshi Nakamoto just came out of the air and gave the world this immaculate conception. But the truth might actually shock you and how it relates to the deep state.
You see, once you start peeling back the layers, Bitcoin is not all that it appears, and you'll learn in this podcast why I'm not trusting it with any of my hard-earned money.
[upbeat music] Okay, uh, for all of you who didn't know, that was actually Colin. That wasn't Tucker Carlson.
Uh, you know, if you're listening, you, you may not have seen Colin's comparatively clean look compared to Tucker Carlson's increasingly haggard look these days. Tucker Carlson, not a fan of Bitcoin, Colin.
Yeah, I think that, you know, Tucker is obviously in a camp that loves Bitcoin. A lot of Bitcoiners love Tucker. There's a lot of ideological alignment.
I think that Tucker has been too far to lever-- too close to levers of power in Washington his entire life, though. So where like he sniffs the conspiracy farts so, [chuckles]
so much that anything that is remotely tied or anything that can be even remotely linked to intelligence agencies is going to be verboten to him, so. Yeah, he's, he's stared so closely into the void, actually.
So here's the actual clip. We have to go to the primary source, otherwise we're just making stuff up. This is Tucker Carlson flexing how his family came from the government, and that's why he doesn't trust Bitcoin.
And nobody can explain to me who Satoshi was, the creator of Bitcoin, this mysterious guy who apparently died, but nobody knows who he was. You know, I grew up in DC, primarily in a government family, so CIA. Uh,
that's my guess. Can't prove it, but like, you're telling me to invest in something whose founder is like mysterious and has billions of dollars of unused Bitcoin. Like what is that?
And no one can answer the question, including some of the biggest holders of Bitcoin in the world who I know personally. They're like, "Oh, it doesn't matter." It matters to me. To, uh, just a few things here.
Uh, first of all, pour one out for our boy Marty Bent at TFTC, with Tucker Carlson [chuckles] saying that he doesn't like Bitcoin. [laughs] Marty's got to be having a, a day with himself with that one.
Underneath the, one of the top comments or the first comment that I saw was when Juan Galt, a writer at Bitcoin Magazine, saying, "It's funny because Tucker Carlson was also created by the CIA."
So I think that's what's funny about this, is there are a lot of people who assume that Tucker Carlson is some sort of CIA, you know, brood child, a, a, a creation for, you know, uh, media manipulation basically.
Because I believe his father was in the CIA. If I, if I, um- Well, you know, he grew up in a government family in DC, so you know, quote, "CIA." [clears throat] Yeah, I mean, so Tucker has...
Tucker, uh, flits between conspiracy and not conspiracy all the time. He's got his classic cadence of telling a story and basically asking, "Well, what, what's the deal with, with whatever?"
And, uh, he kicked off this week's latest take on [clears throat] Bitcoin being either an NSA or CIA construct. But guess what? Tucker's not the first person to say this.
In fact, this is, this, uh, this theory and this, this topic of conversation goes back all the way to the very beginning of Bitcoin.
Um, I think I'll hand it back to you, Colin, because we're going to go back to the days of Gavin Andresen. Gavin Andresen, a name that we have not, uh, heard in a while. Sorry, I was just fact-checking something.
It's a conspiracy theory, apparently, that Tucker's father was in the CIA, or it is uncorroborated. Mm-hmm. But, um, needless to say, it's funny that, uh, you know, the pot's calling the kettle black here.
But to Charlie's point, this is a, th-this is a conspiracy theory that goes back years, and I think that if not the genesis of it,
you know, the event that really placed in a lot of people's minds was Gavin Andresen's announcement on Bitcoin Talk on April twenty-seventh, two thousand and eleven, that he was going to give a presentation to the CIA about Bitcoin.
So this is from Bitcoin Talk. Gavin Andresen, um, was, um, one of the most important developers in Bitcoin's early days. He was, um, the maintainer, right, Charlie, for Bitcoin for a long time.
Yeah, he was the first, like, maintainer, and also he actually came from Google, so that was back in the days when a Google engineer was basically God. He was the first maintainer.
Um, he corresponded with Satoshi quite a lot. Um, and in two thousand and eleven, he writes a Bitcoin Talk.
Uh, "I want to get this out in the open," I'm quoting directly, "because it is the e- kind of thing that will generate conspiracy theories." [chuckles] No shit.
"I'm going to give a presentation about Bitcoin at CIA headquarters in June at an emerging technologies conference for the US intelligence committee, uh, community."
And, and Gavin goes on to basically excuse his actions here, 'cause obviously Bitcoin is a very, you know, the roots of it are in cypherpunk
crypto anarchist ideology, which is, you know, expressively anti-state, anti-centralization. And he's excuses himself, says, "Look, if they're asking me about it, they already know.
They probably know a lot, and this is a good chance for us to get in front of them and kind of drive the narrative in a way that we find good, and hopefully they won't ban it," right? Um, or try to crack down on it.
Uh, kind of a naive position, but you know, you got to have a little bit of optimism, I think.
Bitcoin was still very much a hobbyist project in the day, and, you know, the fact that the CIA is talking to the lead maintainer and saying, "What is this thing?"
That had to be a huge, "Oh, wow, this is actually pretty serious." Um, and I would actually mark this in terms of like events with Bitcoin where, like-In retrospect, seeing it as successful was almost inevitable, right?
In terms of, like, if it's getting interest from the most powerful [chuckles] you know, organization in the world, arguably.
So Gavin visits the CIA, and then, of course, the conspiracy theories that he was worried about start popping off. Now, I'm not gonna read this whole thing,
um, but you can go and we'll put it in the show notes, this Bitcoin talk forum, where this guy tries to piece together the idea that the NSA, CIA, and FBA-- FBI somehow took control of Bitcoin, um, in the years, i-in the months between Gavin visiting the CIA headquarters and the Silk Road getting shut down.
And he makes all of these, you know, kind of, uh, you know, uh, with Charlie from Always Sunny in Philadelphia, crazy conspiracy connections, right?
You know that meme where he's sitting in front of the, the board with all the yarns ki- trying to solve something. Yeah.
And th-there are all of these, you know, kind of e-entanglements that, that this person brings up, but they come to the conclusion that somehow the CIA took control of Bitcoin.
You know what- All that to say, it's like the only way to justify a lot of these things is kind of making these crazy extrapolations, right?
And saying, like, "This person is involved with this person, and they worked at the same company." You know what's interesting is that post from twenty thirteen, that's twelve, almost thirteen years ago,
uh, you actually see a lot of familiar names, which are probably even more conspicuous these days. I see Palantir referenced there. I see Thiel. I see Andreessen Horowitz.
Um, so it's funny how twelve to thirteen years later, Bitcoin looks-- Bitcoin is very, very different and, and, and clearly a w-- a massive su-success, and yet, uh, that conspiracy could have been written today.
So, um, and that's where, that's where Colin and I kind of like, you know, shrug our shoulders and like, you know, make this gesture of like kinda like throwing up our hands. We're like,
I, uh, I struggle to see a full-blown conspiracy. However, like, you know, at-- this is, uh, a new monetary system.
The governments and the powers of, that be in the world have a long history of getting their hands involved in these and, uh, controlling them in some capacity.
So I don't think the NSA or the CIA controls or created Bitcoin, at least I don't believe it in that, like, that narrow of a condi- uh, definition. But, um, like, uh,
there is clearly, there's clearly significant interest, and if they wish to control it, they certainly would be trying in some case.
So I wanna leave it a little bit open there and let you, the reader, make up your own opinion.
But I do think it's kind of ridiculous that Tucker says that he doesn't want to own it because he thinks the NSA or CIA created it. To me, that has pretty big implications, um,
uh, especially if you, if their cr-- the creation of it also assumes the continued, like, shepherding of it toward its current path today. Yeah, and it's, it's an odd thing.
So if you-- First of all, a lot of people just dismiss it outright, which we, I think we both fall in that camp.
Um, but let's say you do entertain it and say that there's a chance that intelligence agencies created it, then you're left with the question of why and also the question of what does that-- what can they do?
Like, what, what, what, what means of control do they have over it? And we'll address some myths about that in a little bit with regards to the NSA and Bitcoin.
You know, even if they did create it, what we know of Bitcoin's code doesn't give them any control over anything more than anyone else.
So this is the other part of it where it kind of gets into Jack Mallers had a reply tweet to Tucker's clip, and he said, "It doesn't matter. They can't do anything that anyone else can't, can, can't do with it."
And that's where the technical ignorance comes in with someone like Tucker Carlson, right? But of course, that's when you get into the conspiracy realm where it's like they're, they're not gonna believe anything.
Like, no amount of evidence within the code is going to convince someone who thinks that there's an, an invisible backdoor. [upbeat music] Hey, Will here with Blockspace Media.
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And there may be people who are working with or planted by or, um, have interacted with, uh, CIA or security NSA officials.
You know, there's prob-- I would-- I think that should be assumed as like a likely scenario of people who are, like, prominent in Bitcoin.
I think that should just be assumed, and it's, it's really difficult and, uh, it's really difficult to, like, try to actually confirm yes or no and to what degree.
[clears throat] But, um, we'll-- let's go into some of the conspiracies, uh, 'cause they are really interesting, and I don't, I don't write them off completely. I do think it's important to like,
you know, challenge them a bit. Um, one of the first ones, this is, uh, referenced a lot, is, um, this paper which was published by, uh, NSA, uh, analysts and researchers in nineteen ninety-six.
It's called How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash. And it's written by three, uh, NSA researchers commissioned by the NSA,
and [clears throat] it describes a pretty coherent way, which in some ways, or a pretty coherent way to create an electronic digital cash.Um, and it has some,
uh, some techniques that it uses, including, I believe, uh, s-certain types of like Merkle tree-like, uh, systems, which are how-- which are kind of back-end how Bitcoin works and, uh, as well as public, private key, public, private key cryptography, talking about how the signatures work.
Uh, and, uh, so it, it has a lot of these, uh, ingredients which were then ten years later, uh, put into the Bitcoin whitepaper.
Uh, and so a lot of people point back to this and say, "Oh, well, the NSA was working on it. They probably went back into the lab to work on it and then put out Bitcoin later."
And then there's this other, uh, part to it where, um, I mean, this, this paper references David Chaum, um, Niles Ferguson, and a, uh, very conspicuous name here, Tatsuwaki,
Tatsuwaki Okamoto, who might sound like Satoshi Nakamoto. There's this paper, uh, people may reference it.
Uh, uh, there was a good somewhat of a rebuttal from, uh, David Rosenthal on this, uh, on a blog back in the day, where he points out that this is a decent, uh,
this is not a crazy leap to make that this paper may have been a precursor to Bitcoin.
Um, but one, this paper and all of the type techniques kind of at the time, in the early nineties especially, were relied on like centralized, uh, mints or kind of some kind of operator to, to operate these cash systems, whereas Bitcoin is decidedly different.
We did not really see anything that was published, uh, prior to Bitcoin, which had, uh, no party issuing the tokens, managing token balance.
Be-because what Satoshi did was really combine multiple, like several of these ideas into an actual, uh, concept for internet money. Uh, that is a distinguishing feature of Bitcoin to all of these other papers.
Um, this was a thing that a lot of people had been trying to work on at the time. Like, people had been working on this.
The cyberpunks had been working on this, um, government officials had been working on this for a long time.
So it's no surprise that there's a lot of cross-pollination in ideas publicly published and, and then I would assume also privately researched. So it's, it's not a surprise to me. Um, Nick Carter
is referenced in this, uh, blog by David Ro-Rosenthal. Um, and Nick has a, a pretty interesting, uh, take, uh, which is actually one of my favorites, um, 'cause he says, "Yes, and."
He says, "I actually do believe this theory that, uh, the NSA, you know, created Bitcoin, but I called it Bitcoin lab leak hypothesis.
I think it was a shuttered internal R&D project which one researcher thought was too good to lay fallow on the shelf and chose to secretly release." Basically arguing that,
yes, the NSA created Bitcoin, but it was probably released and started by someone who was not acting on behalf of the NSA, but rather as an individual who thought this was a pretty compelling idea. Yeah, this is a,
a complication, and it's saying something I think completely different than obviously what Tucker's saying- Yeah. Just to pluck out that last thread that, that you were pointing out. The NSA didn't crack it clearly.
Like, they, they couldn't figure out how to make Bitcoin work the way that it does. They didn't have all the pieces put together that Satoshi ended up putting together for proof of work, right?
So then, in theory, this NSA worker absconded with some of their research, started their own project, and then released it.
That's an interesting theory and entirely probable, especially if you consider you would at least hope that the United States, that the NSA and the CIA have some of the smartest cryptographers working for them.
I mean, maybe they don't, but, like, y- I, I don't know how much they pay them. Maybe they don't have competitive salaries. But you would have to imagine that they have the ability to recruit some pretty smart people. So
that's one of the more interesting theories and doesn't necessarily mean... And, and or rather put it, let me put it this way. It doesn't mean what people necessarily mean when they say the CIA or NSA created Bitcoin.
And I think that's a good kind of segue into the whole concept of the NSA creating Bitcoin in the sense of people actually misunderstand what pieces of Bitcoin the NSA had a hand in developing 'cause I think that's where a lot of people think there's a backdoor involved, and there's no indication that that's the case.
Correct. To the best of my ability without butchering this, 'cause I'm not a cryptographer, and I'm not as technical as I used to be. I used to report on this stuff in CoinDesk all the time, but I focus on mining now.
But, um, there are two components, uh, I think there's one component that's mis-misunderstood with the NSA's contributions to cryptography that led to Bitcoin, and then the one that people, um, generally remember.
They're, they're, they're, they're misattributing its importance. So, um, the NSA was instrumental in devising the SHA-256 hashing algorithm that Bitcoin uses for proof of work, right? Yep.
But I think a lot of people mis-misconstrue that to mean somehow public key cryptography for Bitcoin is, is rooted in what work the NSA's done, and that's not true because Satoshi actually went a different route.
Um, Satoshi Nakamoto did not choose one of the curves, um, that's designed by the NSA. Instead, Bitcoin uses, um, SECP256K1.
Yeah, a-and so I'm not gonna get into all of that stuff, but basically Satoshi made a design difference, um, in terms of the actual public key cr-cryptography for Bitcoin, which necessarily means unless there's something that everyone who scoured the Bitcoin source code from existence is missing, the backdoor that the NSA may or may not have put in their, um, public key system doesn't exist in Bitcoin 'cause one of the fears was, um, the NSA never actually, um, publicizedUm, the constants, the seeds that define their curves.
So there was this fear that maybe there's a backdoor somewhere. But again, Bitcoin doesn't use those curves. So I think that's a misconception that's pretty easily put to rest.
Like, and it goes back to the f- primary thing of even if this was born from an intelligence agency, there's nothing in the code to suggest that they can do anything about it.
Now, whether or not they can do something with the market is another theory that maybe we can address at the end with strategy.
But I want to give you the opportunity to say everything you, uh, about, you know, the NSA and CIA before we move on.
Yeah, I think, um, maybe the other thing I'll say is that im- you know, it, it's, it's pretty bold to say that the NSA, CIA, the government, specifically the U.S.
government apparatus, uh, created and is shepherding and is controlling Bitcoin's path.
Because I think to like actually buy into that, you would kind of have to refactor a lot of your claims and views about how the government currently operates.
Uh, it actually, I think it's actually kind of a challenge to you to say then why would you not own that asset, um, because they've clear- it's clearly been the programmed plan for the better part of two decades that they have shepherded the path of Bitcoin to a long global adoption.
It would also assume a very, very s- uh, patient, methodical, planned, multi-decade transition and con- and, uh, and guided collapse of the existing financial system.
Uh, so if you believe the NSA is behind such a, uh, transition,
uh, and that's why you don't want to own Bitcoin, then I think, uh, it surprises me that you would be out there even commenting on Bitcoin given their scale of control over it. Because, uh, it's...
I just don't really believe that governments can, uh, control such vast, like, sociological trends across like decades and decades and people and, like, tons of people.
I think they can try to guide them, but like this is kind of an emergent social phenomena which is beyond just the government. But, you know, this is my opinion. Uh- Well, I mean, yeah.
I mean, a-anytime the government has tried to, uh, foment social control or soc- f- f- social unrest or try to exert some sort of social control, it ends up backfiring, right? Mm-hmm.
I mean, part of MKUltra and the psychedelic movement in the '60s was a PSYOP to discredit the hippie movement, and it only ended up fanning the flames of the anti-war movement, right? We can also look back at COVID.
Um, a lot of the social controls and social media conditioning that populations were sub-subject to, that backfired. You can't really plan for these things, right?
It's, it's like you have billions of inputs and human beings running around the planet to account for, and you can't actually account...
You can't account for the outcomes for how they're gonna react to every single situation. But, yeah, you could leverage certain financial markets- Yes... to regain control and direction of Bitcoin. Exactly.
And so the two, I think the two levers of control
in the conspiracy realm that we should end on, and we'll start with this one, is the financial lever and then infiltration of development, um, which I don't have much in to constructive to say on other than pointing out that it's a theory.
But yeah. We don't have much constructive to say, except we're just, we can just float the idea and- Yeah... and yeah, you guys are gonna have to debate this out on Twitter and stuff.
But one of my favorite conspiracy theories is that strategy is a CIA operation to kickstart the United States' Bitcoin reserve and potentially give them a massive,
um [chuckles] a massive stack of Bitcoin with which to manipulate Bitcoin's price. I mean, Strategy has over six hundred thousand Bitcoin at this point.
If they go to market, sell a large sum of that, you could tank the price. Why would the US wanna do that? I don't know.
Not even saying that MicroStrategy is, uh, uh, the arm of the CIA, but that, that is the, you know, the, the logic of this conspiracy theory. So in terms of like, where this comes from, um, I don't really have a source.
It seems to have kind of, uh, percolated naturally from, you know, all of the teeming conspiratorial brains that Bitcoin seems to attract. But, uh, here is a
tweet from Joe Rogers, and he said, "One of my favorite conspiracy theories is that MicroStrategy is a front for the US government, CIA stacking sats," and he posts a screenshot of the fact that the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia is a twelve-minute drive [laughs] from Strategy.
Yeah. [laughs] So there, there, there's evidence number one, which, you know, is not strong obviously, but it's fun to point out.
And the other evidence that I can find as far as besides the fact that, you know, MicroStrategy is, is headquartered in Langley, Virginia, is that Karen Schaeffer, former high-level CIA official, uh, serves on MicroStrategy's government services, or at least used to.
So, uh, why does this matter? Uh, it doesn't because it's probably BS.
But if it isn't BS, then the whole idea here is either on, i-i-if you're being charitable, this is a way for the government to hoard a bunch of Bitcoin unofficially before getting it out, you know, doing it through, uh, uh, official channels, or it's a way for them to gain an outsized stake in the Bitcoin network that they can then use to control the market value.
Or, and this is getting really kinda galaxy brain tinfoil, if there's a contentious hard fork, they have the ability to sway market forces to choose the fork that they want Bitcoin to be canonically.
See, I don't- And if that doesn't make sense to you, we have some episodes where we've talked about, um, hard forking, uh, game theory.
We'll link them in the show notesBut basically the idea is, you know, nodes ki-- decide what software they run, but the market ultimately decides which-- what Bitcoin is the most valuable.
And so if there was a contentious hard fork, if MicroStrategy was putting all of its economic power and like Coinbase, all of its economic power behind one coin over the other, it doesn't matter what software your node's running because the biggest institutions in Bitcoin are going to be saying, "This is the ticker that we rep-- that, that we, uh, say is the real Bitcoin."
They may not even like actually have that as a plan. They may just view it as a secular good investment and at some point realize that in like decision-making scenarios,
they're like, "Oh, we actually have the power here. Um, we like this one." You know, it's really hard to describe intent to or, or like what is proactive, what is reactive. And, um,
I, I, I think a lot of conspiracy is actually in that, that gray area between what is a plan and what is a response.
Uh, but I will say, I mean, while we have your ear, you know, look at Time Chain Index, and if you look at like, yes, these are different entities, Coinbase, BlackRock, Strategy, US government, Bitfinex, these are different entities.
You know, all of this Bitcoin is held in US-regulated custodians. So like, it's not just like that Strategy has Bitcoin, it's that, um, the US government within its borders or within its regulated entities has like
over a third of the Bitcoin. Yeah, and, and, and you don't even have to go conspiracy mode here to see the game theory of how the government pushing for specific change to Bitcoin would work.
Like imagine they want to enforce a rule, um, I don't know how you do this technically, you might not be able to, so forgive me, but just in, in, in a realm where anything's possible, they enforce a rule where certain wallets are automatically blacklisted.
All they have to do is go to Coinbase, BlackRock, Strategy, the ETFs, the miners, and tell them, "Hey, once we push this change through, if people don't like it, you have to convert your Bitcoin to the new Bitcoin.
Like that is the new Bitcoin because we're saying so." Um, would that ever happen? I don't know.
Um, but it could happen, and that's, that's, that's part of the reason why I think a lot of people like Shinobi have been beating the drum over we need to get certain custodial things figured out now with covenants before changing Bitcoin becomes too impossible, or they try to do something that is against our interests, so.
You know, I guess maybe to wrap this up, I do kinda wanna poke a little fun at our friend Marty Bent over at TFTC.
Marty's been a long time, uh, conspiracy tweeter, and, uh, I, I believe he often is just, you know, throwing things out there, but he's been a long time Tucker Carlson, like, "Tucker Carlson said this the other day."
But when Tucker Carlson pushes back on Bitcoin, Marty has that Gelman amnesia effect of like, "Oh, well, he doesn't know what he's talking about there."
Look, there's gonna be critics, and they're gonna get bigger and louder. Bitcoin's going to continue to go up. And for this foreseeable future, the critics will just have to have fun staying poor. Staying poor.
On that note, thanks for listening to Bitcoin Season two. Catch you all next week.
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