> But I think that NSA-level organization knows who Satoshi is.

I'm willing to believe that, but probably not in the way you intended. Obviously the actual truth is unknowable so I am not trying to promote any Theories here and am not fond of anyone who does. However I am willing to entertain reasonably-grounded heterodox speculation and hope you all will indulge me with the same :)

One thing I find very interesting about Bitcoin is how most people seem to automatically assume Satoshi is an individual person due to bearing the name of an individual. I Know Myself well enough to admit how much I love a good underdog story about a smart person-like-myself who's upsetting the status quo, Sticking It To The Man, and/or Raging Against the Machine like Snowden. Doubly so when The Man is the monetary system that hurt my family so badly in the 2008 crash, so I Want To Believe in the (2008) Bitcoin origin story and giving power back to the people. Has it? I guess for a few.

As you mentioned, Tor and cryptocurrency usage go hand-in-hand for certain people and certain classes of transactions. Tor is an admitted creation of the US intelligence community, ostensibly for deployed agents as a sort of bidirectional modern-day Numbers Station. I have to ask myself if that intelligence community would allow the continued existence of such a thing if it came to be used in ways that harmed the USA's agendas. Maybe it would be worth it for them, but again it is unknowable: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-01-23/tor-anony... (http://archive.today/WR9X1)

I know the value proposition of Bitcoin et al for me an an individual, but lately I've been thinking about plausible ways cryptocurrency could simultaneously create incentives/outcomes benefiting others. Cryptocurrency mining sure has done a good job eliminating public availability of general-purpose computing resources since miners will find and exploit them. That kind of thing helps push us all into the open arms of the Tier-1 Internet gatekeepers like AWS and Cloudflare and away from a distributed network where all peers could be equal. Even Github Actions got bitten by this: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/github-action...

Privately-owned general-purpose computing seems to be under attack as well. There's no emotion more motivating than fear, and the constant news about CryptoLocker-style ransonware attacks could help manufacture consent for "trusted" computing platforms à la M1 Macs and Windows 11, even among techies who would usually be vehemently against those kind of creeping restrictions. I guess it's an acceptable compromise if it Keeps Me Safe. There wouldn't even be a need for an intelligence community to get their hands dirty since the monetary incentive makes crypto malware inevitable.

What if an intelligence community wanted to buy up a bunch of parallel computing hardware supply (e.g. GPUs) for years without everybody questioning it? Even I don't think twice about blaming miners for the out of control pricing and availability, but I've been reading articles since like 2013 about how ASIC miners spell the end for profitable GPU Bitcoin mining. Aaaany day now would be great. I guess it's all those other coins. Again, unknowable.

I'll stop here since this is rambling and probably too close to Theory territory, but I've been thinking about my assumptions a lot lately and these are a few of them.