Nic Carter, a proponent of Bitcoin, has come forward to reaffirm his support for the hypothesis that the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States played a role in the invention of Bitcoin.
Daniel Roberts, a co-founder of Iris Energy, seems to have resurrected the ten-year-old notion on X on September 15 after uploading images from a 1996 article titled "How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash."
The article is one of the earliest talks of a system similar to Bitcoin that suggests utilizing public-key cryptography to enable users to send money anonymously without disclosing their identities.
According to the footer notes, the study was "prepared by NSA employees." Tatsuaki Okamoto, a cryptography specialist who co-invented the Okamoto-Uchiyama public key cryptosystem in 1998, was one of the sources.
On Sept. 21, Carter, a partner at Castle Island Ventures, doubled down his support for the notion, stating, âI actually do believe this,â before adding:
âI call it the âBitcoin lab leak hypothesis.â 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.â
Carter has actually held the theory for several years, proposing back in 2020: âIf Bitcoin was written by NSA cryptographers as a monetary bioweapon, if you will, and the code escaped those sensitive confines... does that make it a virus... that escaped from a lab?â
In 2021, he stated, âThe only decent thing the NSA ever did from the world was let bitcoin leak from the lab.â
