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