I was speaking with a friend just yesterday about how useful and easy it would be (if you're the CIA/NSA) to run, say, the VPN "Private Internet Access". In th

I was speaking with a friend just yesterday about how useful and easy it would be (if you're the CIA/NSA) to run, say, the VPN "Private Internet Access". In that conversation I came to similar speculations as pg's about Bitcoin (I mean, the first client was written for Windows, which straight away seems decidedly not-hacker-y). As for motivation: it's not as though this would be the first time that a spy agency found sources of funds extra-congressionally (see, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair). Perhaps, alternatively, they thought it was worth experimenting with, say: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market . Another explanation would be that someone at a gov't agency figured out that a crypto-currency was likely to come into existence at one point or another, and if/when one did, it would be very useful/necessary to buy a lot of it/get involved. If the currency was designed by someone else/a large open source community, it might (or might not) have flaws in it that could render the currency fundamentally unstable and make questionable any involvement of the agency in the currency (e.g., they'd have to choose which cryto-currencies to invest in, they might find it difficult to work with the authors to correct any systemic flaws, they'd probably have to buy a lot of the currency rather late in the game). Another reason is that, if the agency in question designed the currency itself, it would have a large head-start on putting together the hardware that could be used to disrupt it/eliminate it, if need be (c.f. US military control of GPS). Who knows, perhaps the RAND Corporation put out a report forecasting the introduction of crypto-currencies and showing that the organization/state that first introduced it would gain a significant strategic win. If I were an administrator of the NSA/CIA/whatever, I can imagine being won over by arguments that a crypto-currency was inevitable, and that my agency/country would have a major advantage (financially and strategically) if it designed said currency itself rather than letting someone else do it.