Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Bitcoin subversives

Increasingly popular among get-rich-quick speculators, bitcoin started out as a high-minded project to make financial transactions public and mathematically verifiable — while also offering discretion. Governments, with a vested interest in controlling how money moves, would, some of bitcoin’s fierce advocates believed, naturally try and thwart the coming techno-libertarian financial order.

  The Intercept
Who wouldn't have expected that? I'm not a techo-libertarian, nor am I a rocket scientist, and I can't imagine they wouldn't try.
It turns out the conspiracy theorists were onto something. Classified documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden show that the National Security Agency indeed worked urgently to target bitcoin users around the world — and wielded at least one mysterious source of information to “help track down senders and receivers of Bitcoins,” according to a top-secret passage in an internal NSA report dating to March 2013.

  The Intercept
You can safely bet that anyone or anything that might threaten the system will be on the NSA's radar.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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