Pseudonymity for transactions, intelligence gathering, influencing... it's 'money' and 'network analysis' and both of those have a lot of uses. Bitcoin is very

Pseudonymity for transactions, intelligence gathering, influencing... it's 'money' and 'network analysis' and both of those have a lot of uses. Bitcoin is very well designed, so it's not unreasonable to think that a brilliant mind or a team is behind it. Governments employ lots of mathematicians, computer scientists, and cryptography experts who would possess the the skills and man-hours necessary to devote to such an endeavor; whereas a lone hobbyist would have had to get the design right the first time the scheme became public. It's not even that much money to spend, relatively speaking. A state-level agency from any of the highest military spending countries [1] possesses well in excess of the computational power required to mine coins. In this case, they released it into to the community and now it's a fixture most use but never seriously question. The UK's GCHQ invented RSA 4 years earlier than Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman [2], but this fact was classified for 24 years. I think this is a very plausible theory that explains why Satoshi has stayed silent, and why Bitcoin was invented in the first place: not for personal gain or pride, but national interests by a well-equipped state. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Cocks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Cocks