A conspiracy theory has been making the rounds on YouTube and social media this past week, that bitcoin may have been created by an Artificial Intelligence (AI). This speculation is based partly on a recent interview with Quinn Michaels, who suggested the possibility, as well as the timing of an AI-like android named 'Sophia' being paraded in the media. Apparently this Sophia will have 'her' own cryptocurrency, or be programmed to interface in some fashion with blockchain technology.
Almost immediately following the Quinn Michaels interview, as the internet grist mill caught wind, other videos began to emerge with commentary claiming that Bitcoin is the mark of the beast and Sophia the Antichrist. Think of that what you will. However, what I found most interesting in perusing such videos, was a fact heretofore unknown to me. Dan Kaminsky, one of the world's foremost cyber security experts, and perhaps the best known authority in the field of penetration testing of digital systems for vulnerabilities, was quoted as follows in a piece by the New Yorker, published in 2011:
“When I first looked at the code (bitcoin's 31,000 lines of code), I was sure I was going to be able to break it,” Kaminsky said, noting that the programming style was dense and inscrutable. “The way the whole thing was formatted was insane. Only the most paranoid, painstaking coder in the world could avoid making mistakes.”
"He quickly identified nine ways to compromise the system and scoured Nakamoto’s code for an insertion point for his first attack. But when he found the right spot, there was a message waiting for him. “Attack Removed,” it said. The same thing happened over and over, infuriating Kaminsky. “I came up with beautiful bugs,” he said. “But every time I went after the code there was a line that addressed the problem.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Kaminsky said, still in awe. ...Kaminsky ticked off the skills Nakamoto would need to pull it off. “He’s a world-class programmer, with a deep understanding of the C++ programming language,” he said. “He understands economics, cryptography, and peer-to-peer networking.” ... “Either there’s a team of people who worked on this,” Kaminsky said, “or this guy is a genius.” (end quote)
In another article featured on Business Insider, Kaminsky had this to say (heavily excerpted):
"Seriously though, as an engineer and as a hacker (and I promise you, these are two very different things), Bitcoin surprised me. ... By all extant metrics in security system review, this system should have failed instantaneously, at every possible layer. ... Bitcoin reflects an entirely alien design regime."
According to a cryptography expert quoted in the same New Yorker article, Satoshi Nakamoto would have had to not only be one of the world's top programmers, but concurrently one of the world's top cryptographers as well, "combining concepts in a genuinely new way."
These quotes, in and of themselves, are very fascinating to speculate over. Like many of you, I'm a big fan of cryptocurrency. That being said, there are extremely few things that I will ever absolutely conclude on without remaining open to new information. Anything is possible. So perhaps Nakamoto was a sort of modern-day Renaissance man; a Nikola Tesla for the digital age. Or perhaps there are other explanations.
One of the things that has always somewhat bugged me, is that bitcoin uses SHA-256 for encryption and this protocol was actually developed by the NSA. On the surface I can't think of any real good reason the NSA would have created and released an advanced encryption method into the wild that they themselves were not able to break, or at the very least had some ulterior motive for. Can you? I know this question gets brought up a lot by noobs, but I guess that's because it's the most obvious one.
I will continue to reserve at least some skepticism over the future of cryptocurrency (although I am avidly investing in it), if for no other reason than that 'the powers that should not be' are technocrats at heart, and moving toward a cashless society has long been one of their end games, not to mention the centrally planned smart grid agenda, aka Agenda 21, which fits in with the 'Internet of Things' (IoT). The two (IoT and blockchain) might just be moving in lockstep. Even if they did not have a direct hand in creating it, the globalist oligarchs must be looking to these technological developments as some kind of manna from heaven (or hell).
Personally, I am not convinced that the whole AI project is as far along as we are led to believe, or that true AI is entirely possible at all. But, it seems almost a foregone conclusion that blockchain technology will be used to integrate the coming autonomous economy of driverless vehicles, smart utilities, robotic butlers, and the rest.
So, what happens to consensus in a digital ecosystem where, say, more than 51% of nodes on a blockchain are being run by (soft) AI? Would it still be decentralized? What would a blockchain with millions or billions of 'Sophias' networked together look like? Would it still be millions of Sophias', or just Sophia?
I don't have the answers. A part of me does wonder if we're all being led down a garden path, though not necessarily isolated to the cryptocurrency phenomenon itself. After all, the internet and much of the tech that runs on it were funded either directly or indirectly by DARPA, In-Q-Tel, and the usual suspects. The rate at which new technology is advancing certainly feels like its accelerating ... hopefully not into a free fall.