Cornell Professor Claims Bitcoin Was An NSA Creation—Expert Pushes Back

A fresh round of speculation about Bitcoin’s origins erupted this week after Cornell professor Dave Collum told Tucker Carlson that “the first paper on crypto was written by three NSA guys,” advancing a theory that US intelligence seeded BTC to acclimate the public to a future of central bank digital currencies. “I’d release the crypto. I’d have guys pumping it… let them debug the networks… and then I’d say, ‘Okay, it was fun. We’ll take it from here,’” Collum argued, suggesting that elites would never permit an uncontrolled monetary network to survive.

Was Bitcoin Created By The NSA?

Swan Bitcoin’s daily program No Second Best devoted its August 21 episode to the claim—and to the broader idea that Bitcoin, stablecoins, and US public debt are entangled in ways that conspiracy narratives miss. Host Hurley framed the NSA-origin story as a persistent myth that “just won’t die,” then pivoted to a different “Trojan horse” dynamic: dollar stablecoins absorbing short-term Treasury issuance and, in some issuers’ cases, directing part of the resulting income toward Bitcoin.

“While Tucker and Collum are busy chasing CIA shadows,” Hurley said, “there is a real Trojan horse at play. But it’s not Bitcoin being used by governments. It’s stablecoins and US debt quietly paving the way for Bitcoin’s rise.” At the core of Collum’s argument is a real historical artifact: “How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash,” a 1996–97 paper credited to three researchers in the National Security Agency’s Cryptology Division.

Its survey of e-cash concepts predates Bitcoin by more than a decade, and it has long fueled speculation about official-sector interest in digital cash architectures. But existence is not authorship. The paper does not propose Bitcoin’s design, and nothing in the public record links the NSA to the creation of the Bitcoin protocol released by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008–09.

Collum, however, insisted that elite families and institutions would never allow a truly free monetary protocol to dethrone them. “Do you think the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds are going to hand it over to Max Keiser and Michael Saylor? I don’t think so.”

For him, Bitcoin is not an escape route but a setup. “If I were smart and I were going to bring in central bank digital currency, which is an authoritarian nightmare, I would do it the way they did. I’d release the crypto. I’d have guys pumping it. I’d have guys supporting it. I’d let them debug the networks and the kinks and acclimate people to it. And then I’d say, ‘Okay, it was fun. We’ll take it from here.’”

Hurley countered that logic head-on. “Here’s the thing, it already is happening. The protocol doesn’t ask permission. It doesn’t need approval from the Rockefellers or the Rothschilds or any US administration. For one thing, there’s absolutely no evidence that the CIA or the NSA or any other three-letter agency created Bitcoin.” He also dismissed linguistic conspiracy arguments outright: “If this was the NSA’s super-secret project, why would they hide the clue in plain sight inside a Google-translatable Japanese name?

To twist Satoshi Nakamoto into CIA code is peak conspiracy brain.” The name-as-clue trope—often summarized as “Satoshi = intelligence, Nakamoto = central origin, therefore ‘central intelligence’”— collapses under scrutiny. Satoshi is a common Japanese given name meaning “intelligent,” “wise,” or similar, while Nakamoto is a routine surname typically glossed as “central origin” or “one who lives in the middle.” That is linguistics, not cryptography, and it doesn’t imply an intelligence-agency signature.

More importantly, even if a government employee had once explored ideas adjacent to e-cash, BTC’s governance and code availability undercut the “trapdoor” thesis. Bitcoin Core is open-source software published under the permissive MIT license; the codebase, development process, and consensus rules are public, auditable, and forkable. No hidden “off switch” has ever been demonstrated in 16 years of global adversarial testing—an empirical record that matters more than origin mythology.

Is Bitcoin A Trojan Horse?

Where the Swan episode shifted the conversation was in connecting stablecoin market structure to US debt issuance—an institutional story rather than a clandestine one. Hurley highlighted the irony: “The real theft of liberty is happening through fiat itself. Your savings diluted by 7, 10, or 15 percent a year—that’s state-sanctioned financial slavery. Cash might give you short-term transactional privacy, but Bitcoin gives you long-term sovereignty.”

In July, President Donald Trump signed the GENIUS Act, the first US federal stablecoin law, which requires 1:1 reserves in cash and short-term Treasuries (among other disclosures and licensing provisions). That legal architecture explicitly channels payment-stablecoin collateral into highly liquid dollar assets.

That pipeline already exists in practice. Tether—by far the largest dollar stablecoin—reported in its latest attestation that it has become one of the largest holders of US Treasury bills, with a triple-digit-billion exposure, and it also holds Bitcoin directly on its balance sheet. Company disclosures suggest Bitcoin remains a single-digit percentage of reserves, but a disproportionately large driver of profits during rising markets. Those facts support, without proving, the show’s thesis that the dollar-stablecoin complex can act as a conduit from Treasury coupons to Bitcoin accumulation.

Preston Pysh pushed the point on stage at the Baltic Honeybadger conference two weeks ago, arguing that short-duration Treasury issuance has found a “natural buyer” in stablecoin issuers who prefer minimal duration risk—and that some issuers then “sweep” income into Bitcoin, reinforcing the asset’s monetization over time. Whether this represents a “Trojan horse” for Bitcoin or simply rational treasury management by private firms is debatable, but the mechanism he sketched is plainly visible in public filings and market behavior.

Hurley concluded: “Bitcoin is the Trojan horse, but for freedom. The endgame is Bitcoin itself.”

At press time, BTC traded at $113,045.