Quote from: InspiredEye on April 25, 2013, 06:15:54 PM

Have you seen Paul Graham's post hypothesizing bitcoin may have been developed by a government? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5547423

The hashing algorithms for Bitcoin are based on the USA's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published PKE algorithms. These standards are proposed by technologists from applicable fields then reimplemented/refined over time based on peer-revue and ultimately public contests involving substantial prizes to the person/group that discovers a flaw and/or develops the fastest key-cracking methodology. The Bitcoin algorithms use a sub-set of the published hashing standards for purposes they were intentionally designed for with the exception of using "little-endian" bit-order processing (a vestige of compiler/assembler addressing optimizations which can save space and increase throughput by reducing the size of block-aligned address indexes) as opposed to "big-endian" processing which is implicit in the published standards.

So it's safe to say that a government did develop Bitcoin technology. Whether or not one also created the real-world application seems immaterial since the entire block-chain is easily obtained. Anything from a person to a government can use the 'information' accumulated in the chain for any purpose that suits their needs.

It's surprising that Graham didn't suggest the possibility of Bitcoin being "digital currency 0.1 (alpha)" which could be observed with no responsibility by anyone to actually back or regulate. Even in this case the prime-mover in fabricating the technological application is still irrelevant since anyone can make experimental observations on the currency and its exchange.

I'm not certain why the OP (or anyone) would presume governments would be the most likely suspects for control of the Bitcoin exchange rate when so many other suspects actually stand to gain from such market manipulation.

Just my 0.00000002 BTC. The thread looked interesting and I can't seem to post/reply in any group but this one...