I'll bet you all the bitcoin's in China the NSA was absolutely involved in it. Can't have the USA's faux currency being undermined you know!
I'll bet you all the bitcoin's in China the NSA was absolutely involved in it. Can't have the USA's faux currency being undermined you know!
If I were NSA, and concerned about hawala as a method of anonymously transferring money to finance terrorism and/or drug / sex / counterfeit trafficking / "sensitive" information trade or valuta exchange, I might think of creating a seemingly anonymous, encrypted channel that I could monitor and control, given the availability of the best cryptoanalysts / hackers and "backdoors" in some of the most widely available encryption software (e.g., RSA).
Making an encrypted P2P protocol is laughably trivial today - just look at the multitude of other "coins" popping out of aether. A little bit of word-of-mouth promotion and... voilà! That should redirect significant amounts of all kinds of hawala to the "captive" channel of Bitcoin economy. It could even be self-financing with the nice profit on the scheme, so no taxpayer financing or disclosure is necessary.
Now, since the real "owner" / "controller" of the scheme must remain incognito, how do we name him/her/them? What if we also leave an "Easter egg" hidden in plain sight?
But that's just me... Or is this a wee bit too Pelican Brief?