Chinese-Canadian Professor Claims Bitcoin May Have Been Created by the CIA; Crypto Community Refutes His Misunderstanding of Decentralization

BroadChain04/17/2026, 07:00 PM

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Summary

BroadChain learned that on April 17 at 19:00, according to Bitcoinist, Chinese-Canadian educator and YouTube channel "Predicting History" host Xueqin Jiang recently advanced a controversial claim suggesting Bitcoin may have been created by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or a broader "deep state," rather than by the anonymous developer Satoshi Nakamoto. In a podcast episode aired on April 15, Jiang applied game-theoretic elimination to challenge the standard origin narrative as "illogical," arguing that entities possessing blockchain technical capability, standing to benefit from its creation, and having strong incentives for secrecy are most likely U.S. intelligence and defense agencies—such as DARPA, NSA, and the CIA. He posits that blockchain’s strategic purpose includes surveillance and

BroadChain has learned that according to a Bitcoinist report on April 17 at 19:00, Chinese-Canadian educator and YouTube host of "Predicting History," Xueqin Jiang, recently put forward a controversial claim: Bitcoin may not have been created by the anonymous developer Satoshi Nakamoto, but rather by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or a broader "deep state." In a podcast episode released on April 15, Jiang used game-theoretic reasoning to challenge the conventional origin story as "illogical." He argued that the entities most likely to possess both the technical capability to develop blockchain technology and the incentive to benefit from it—while also having reason to conceal their involvement—would be U.S. intelligence and defense agencies such as DARPA, the NSA, and the CIA. Jiang suggested that blockchain serves strategic purposes like surveillance and covert financing, and that its value depends on public belief in its ability to "transcend political control." This claim quickly drew strong pushback from the Bitcoin community. Commentator Ansel Lindner dismissed the theory as stemming from "a fundamental misunderstanding of decentralization." Lyn Alden emphasized that Bitcoin’s core lies in its open-source nature and Proof-of-Work mechanism—making the creator’s identity irrelevant, since its transparency and decentralized design allow for independent verification. Another commentator, MDB, noted that Jiang’s question—"Where are Bitcoin servers located?"—reveals a basic misunderstanding of how distributed node networks function. At the time of reporting, Bitcoin was trading at $74,886.