Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Has the NSA already broken bitcoin?
by
Beliathon
on 24/04/2015, 23:53:08 UTC
Apart from that, what makes you think that Bitcoin is not an NSA project to begin with?
What makes you think that, even if that were the case, it would matter at all?

Bitcoin is open source, and clearly documented, and everybody can verify that it does what it's supposed to do, and cannot be controlled by the maker or anyone else.
Whoever made Bitcoin, or why, is completely irrelevant.

And by the way, I still see a lot of people in this thread talking about the NSA (or China or quantum computers or anyone) decrypting stuff, or 'breaking encryption'. Get a grip, people. THERE IS NO ENCRYPTION IN BITCOIN WHATSOEVER. So there's nothing to decrypt to begin with.
Maybe it is just semantics but when you sign a transaction with your private key some people would call that encrypting.  
The problem is that you think such a concept exists as "private key", as if the privacy in inherent to the key. The phrase seems to imply that a private key is always private and cannot suddenly and inexplicably become known to someone else. This is a mistake, because in reality, there are only keys, which are bits of highly sensitive information, bits of math. The privacy or publicity of these bits of this information is the responsibility of whoever hold(s) keys. Always remember, information seeks to be free just as water seeks to flow down toward sea level.