I've long suspected bitcoin was created by a government. Bulletproof protocols usually require peer review, yet there have been zero leaks from the reviewers. Pools of crypto guys who don't leak stuff are usually employed by governments. The part that puzzles me is why a government would do this. I can imagine several possibilities: 1. To finance their own black operations. 2. Because they thought digital currencies were inevitable, and they preferred bitcoin to some potentially more malevolent form. (Could bitcoin have been worse from a government's point of view?) 3. A friend suggested this: because they felt their currency would never become the standard reserve currency, and they felt it was better that no one's be if theirs couldn't be. 4. A variant of the above: the US did it because it seemed inevitable that the dollar would eventually lose its place as the standard reserve currency, and better to have it replaced by bitcoin that the yuan. I realize some of these explanations are pretty far fetched, but so is an individual cooking up bitcoin as an intellectual exercise. Whatever the explanation of bitcoin's origin turns out to be, it will probably be pretty weird.