What Would the CIA Actually Build?
Bitcoin Has Been Audited for 17 Years. Nobody Found the Backdoor.
I recently listened to a smart person make a provocative argument: Bitcoin was created by the CIA. It’s a long interview, but you can check out the specific portion here - it’s about 5 minutes long.
He didn’t claim to have evidence. He said he didn’t need it — the game theory was enough. That’s worth taking seriously. And then taking apart.
The person making this argument is Professor Jiang Xueqin: Yale-educated, decades of living and working in China, a public track record of predictions that have come true — Trump in 2016, the US-Iran conflict, and more. He runs a YouTube channel and Substack called Predictive History, and he’s made a career out of asking the question most analysts avoid: who actually benefits from this, and who had the capability to make it happen?
His method is applied game theory. He identifies the structural incentives, asks who benefits, asks who had the means, and reasons from there. It’s a useful framework — probably the most useful one for cutting through official narratives and asking harder questions about how the world actually works.
When he applies it to Bitcoin, he arrives at the CIA.
His three-part argument: only organizations like DARPA or the NSA had the technical capacity to build something like a blockchain; the CIA benefits in two ways — a transparent, time-stamped ledger functions as a surveillance tool for monitoring financial flows, and a mining and issuance mechanism provides a potential off-budget funding channel; secrecy about the creator isn’t accidental but essential — Bitcoin only works as a neutral monetary system if no one believes a government built it.
It’s a tidy argument. The problem is that it isn’t actually evidence of anything.
Here’s what I mean. Game theory is a tool for predicting how rational actors will behave going forward. Given a set of incentives and players, you can model likely outcomes. It’s extraordinarily useful for that purpose — which is why Jiang has been right about some things.
But game theory doesn’t reconstruct history. “This is what a rational actor would have done” is not the same as “this is what happened.” Every detective story has a motive. Motive alone doesn’t convict anyone.
The CIA benefiting from a transparent financial ledger and the CIA creating a transparent financial ledger are two completely different claims. The first might be true. The second requires actual evidence — a document, a source, a pattern of behavior that goes beyond “here’s who would want to.”
Applied backwards across history without corroborating facts, game-theoretic reasoning can explain almost any outcome. That’s what makes it seductive. It’s also what makes it dangerous.
The second piece of Jiang’s argument is that only state-level actors — the same people who built the internet and GPS — had the expertise to build Bitcoin.
This underestimates what was already publicly available.
Bitcoin didn’t arrive from nowhere. It emerged from two decades of published cryptographic research by people who were not working for the government. David Chaum published his e-cash protocols in the 1980s. Adam Back published Hashcash in 1997. Wei Dai published B-money in 1998. Nick Szabo described Bit Gold between 1998 and 2005. Every one of these was a public paper, available to any developer paying attention.
When Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2008, the citations at the bottom pointed directly to this lineage. Bitcoin wasn’t a mysterious genesis. It was a synthesis — a small group who had studied the prior art, identified the missing pieces, and solved the last integration problem.
This is actually how most significant software gets built. Not by a lone genius working in a vacuum, and not necessarily by a government agency with a black budget. By someone who studied what already existed, understood the unsolved problems, and put the final pieces together. A developer with deep expertise in cryptography and distributed systems, working for years on a problem they cared about, building on decades of publicly available research — that’s not an implausible story. It’s a common one.
The most technically interesting part of Jiang’s argument is his challenge about servers.
“Where are the blockchain servers located? Because if you’re able to control the hardware, you can also control the software.”
It’s a sharp question. It’s also built on a misunderstanding of how Bitcoin actually works.
Bitcoin has no central servers. It runs on thousands of independent nodes distributed across the globe. But there are two fundamentally different kinds of nodes, and Jiang appears to know about only one of them.
Mining nodes are what most people picture — machines running specialized hardware that solve computational puzzles to produce new blocks. Mining requires significant energy and investment. You can see the large operations. You can point to them on a map.
Full verifying nodes are something else entirely. These are ordinary computers — a laptop with enough storage will do — that hold a complete copy of the Bitcoin blockchain and check every single transaction and block against the protocol rules. If a block violates the rules, the verifying node rejects it, regardless of who produced it. Anyone can run one. Right now, over 18,000 publicly reachable full nodes are distributed across dozens of countries, and an unknown number of additional nodes operate without broadcasting their presence.
This is the piece Jiang misses. Even if a single actor controlled all of the mining hardware on earth — even the US government — they couldn’t change what Bitcoin is. Every verifying node in the world would simply reject the invalid blocks. The honest chain continues under the original rules.
Miners produce blocks. Verifying nodes accept or reject them. The verifying nodes are what keep the blockchain accurate. Controlling the hardware doesn’t control the software when the software runs on thousands of independent machines with no common owner and no off switch.
The Winklevoss anecdote is the weakest pillar in Jiang’s case.
He finds it suspicious that the twins — non-technologists, in his framing — made a large early bet on Bitcoin. The implication: people don’t put serious money into obscure assets without non-public confirmation.
The simpler answer is that Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss were already among the most technology-forward people of their generation before Bitcoin existed. Their entire early biography is defined by recognizing the potential of emerging digital platforms before most people did. The connection to Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook wasn’t random — they were actively looking for what was coming next.
And then they didn’t just hold Bitcoin. They built Gemini, one of the most institutionally credible and federally regulated cryptocurrency exchanges in the country, and turned their entire professional careers into this industry. That’s not the behavior of people who received a government tip and moved on. That’s what conviction looks like when it turns into a decade of work.
Which brings me to the question I’d most want to put to Jiang directly.
If Bitcoin is a CIA project, it is the strangest intelligence operation in the history of the agency.
The CIA’s defining capabilities are control, secrecy, and information asymmetry. Covert networks. Hidden funding streams. One-directional intelligence flows where the agency sees everything and targets see nothing.
Bitcoin is designed as the precise opposite of every one of those things.
Every transaction ever made on the Bitcoin network is publicly visible to anyone with an internet connection, going back to January 2009. Every line of code is public — scrutinized by independent cryptographers, academic researchers, adversarial nation-states, and security firms across seventeen years of continuous attack. No credible researcher has ever found a backdoor. You don’t need to take anyone’s word for this. You can read the code yourself.
If you wanted a surveillance tool, you’d want to see transactions while your targets couldn’t — but Bitcoin gives everyone equal visibility, including the people being watched. If you wanted a black-ops financing mechanism, you’d want hidden transactions — but Bitcoin’s ledger is permanent and public, and blockchain analytics firms have made it arguably the most traceable financial rail in existence. Criminals who have used Bitcoin for serious crimes have been caught precisely because of the transparency of the blockchain.
The CIA has genuinely covert channels available to it: wire transfers through shell companies, offshore accounts, classified cash programs. Tools that actually work for the stated purpose. So the question isn’t whether the CIA could have built Bitcoin. The question is: why would they build something designed from its first line of code to defeat everything they depend on?
Here’s what I think the CIA theory actually reveals — and it isn’t anything about the CIA.
If you take Bitcoin at face value — as an open-source, trustless, mathematically scarce monetary system built by a small group of cypherpunks trying to solve a specific problem with the existing financial system — you have to take seriously what that implies about the system it was designed to replace.
A CIA origin story is, in a way, more comforting. It keeps Bitcoin inside the existing power structure, as a tool of the powerful rather than a challenge to them. If the CIA built it, the system is still in control. Nothing has actually changed. You don’t have to sit with the more difficult question: what does it mean that a group of developers built something no government can shut down, no central bank can inflate, and no authority can confiscate?
Jiang is a serious thinker with a documented track record. I’d rather engage with his argument rigorously than wave it away — which is what many Bitcoin advocates would do. But game theory tells you what a rational actor would do going forward. It doesn’t tell you what happened in the past. And the technology itself, fully open and auditable to anyone in the world, is its own kind of evidence.
If the CIA built Bitcoin, they built the most transparent, uncontrollable, and self-defeating intelligence project in their history.
That’s a strange way to run an operation.