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Over at Medium, a blogger claims to have an inside source at NSA that claimed that the NSA put in effort to determine the person(s) behind Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of Bitcoin.
According to the blog, the NSA created a "fingerprint" of Nakamoto's writing style(s) and used this fingerprint as follows:
The NSA then took bulk emails and texts collected from their mass surveillance efforts. First through PRISM (a court-approved front-door access to Google and Yahoo user accounts) and then through MUSCULAR (where the NSA copies the data flows across fiber optic cables that carry information among the data centers of Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Facebook) the NSA was able to place trillions of writings from more than a billion people in the same plane as Satoshi's writings to find his true identity. The effort took less than a month and resulted in positive match.
The blog goes on to discuss that it may be a Chinese or Russian individual or group, possibly a state actor. Of course, that's quite a claim so that would require quite a proof.
The blogger has updated the post to decline to substantiate these rumours.
What do you guys think: does the NSA have the capability to perform such an investigation? And is it cheap enough for them to waste it on this? If so, what's next? the NSA identifying the location of Jimmy Hoffa's body?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 02 2017, @03:08AM
Seems likely, anonymity was never possible with bitcoin and now we've found out that even the services that supposedly anonymize transactions do not work. Sounds like a great ploy to uncover people that need anonymity and vastly underestimate the level of tracking that gov agencies are now capable of. I'm sure every spook agency was on board with sharing their data, no one they give two shits about (friends that is) would be using BC anyway.