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ToggleIn the past two days, Professor Jiang's views on Bitcoin have started circulating in the crypto. In fact, he is already quite well-known in China.
He is Jiang Xueqin, an education reformer and international affairs commentator currently living in Beijing with 2.28 million YouTube subscribers. His "conspiracy theory" about Bitcoin appeared in his interview on the Jack Neel Podcast .
He argued that Bitcoin is not a product of the cryptography community, but rather a "global surveillance tool" designed by US intelligence agencies. This argument found an audience amidst heightened geopolitical anxieties, but the crypto community reacted negatively, finding his words unpalatable.
Professor Jiang's Bitcoin game theory
Jiang Xueqin's core argument regarding Bitcoin is that Satoshi Nakamoto's anonymity is highly questionable at the institutional level, and only government agencies with the time, funds, servers, and technical capabilities could deploy such a system.
He stated on the program: "When you use game theory to analyze and exhaust all possibilities, you will eventually arrive at the deep government, you will arrive at the CIA."
He proposed three inferences:
First, technological capability. DARPA (Advanced Technology Agency) has a history of building ARPANET, proving that the military would repackage technology as a civilian product.
Second, the beneficiaries. Public blockchains are permanent ledgers, allowing intelligence agencies to mine transaction records without limit.
Third, there is no incentive to distribute it for free. An open-source system without commercial purpose needs an organization to bear the costs.
However, these three pieces of logic share a common premise: that Bitcoin requires infrastructure that someone "deploys" and "maintains," which is a flawed premise in the case of Bitcoin.
Where is the server?
In the interview, Jiang Xueqin asked, "Do you know where the Bitcoin servers are located?"
But we all know that Bitcoin does not have a central server (it's never too late to know this). It is a peer-to-peer (P2P) network where every node is equal and no single node has special permissions.
Recent data shows that there are approximately 71,492 reachable Bitcoin nodes globally, distributed across multiple countries including the United States (10.92%) and Germany (4.97%), with over 64% of these nodes operating anonymously via VPN or Tor.
The Bitcoin network currently has a hashrate of approximately 1.13 ZH/s, which is an extremely high level of hashrate in its history. The cost of attacking or controlling this network far exceeds any reasonable intelligence budget.
In terms of software clients, Bitcoin Core accounts for 77% and Bitcoin Knots accounts for 22%, indicating that there is no single software dependency.
The goal stated clearly in the 2008 Bitcoin white paper was: "removing trusted third parties."
This design goal directly conflicts with any form of centralized monitoring architecture. If the CIA's objective is to build monitoring tools, they will not choose an architecture designed to minimize central control.
Knowledge of Cypherpunk is public.
Jiang Xueqin's second premise is that only government agencies possess the technical capabilities and motivation to create Bitcoin. However, all the core concepts used in Bitcoin have publicly available academic and technical backgrounds.
In 1998, Wei Dai published the b-money proposal, which became the first reference cited in the Bitcoin white paper.
In the same year, Nick Szabo conceived of Bit Gold, proposing a concept that combines proof-of-work with a chain of ownership.
In 2004, Hal Finney launched RPOW (Reusable Proofs of Work), further refining the technical feasibility of exchangeable tokens.
Satoshi Nakamoto integrated proof-of-work, the longest chain rule, and block rewards in 2008 to complete the design of Bitcoin.
Nine days after the Genesis Block was created, Hal Finney received the first Bitcoin transaction in history, totaling 10 BTC.
This knowledge lineage is fully documented in publicly available mailing lists and papers, predating any known public interest in decentralized electronic cash by U.S. intelligence agencies.
Other questions and Jiang Xueqin's own response
Jiang Xueqin faces criticism not only from the crypto community. Archaeologist Flint Dibble directly accused him of spreading "extremely harmful conspiracy theories" and stated that his prediction record "is not as accurate as it appears."
Journalist Mehdi Hasan questioned his dissemination of "content that is clearly anti-Semitic and stereotypical" and objected to his being given the title of "professor," when his actual position was a high school teacher.
Jiang Xueqin's response to some of the criticism is noteworthy. He responded, "I may be a useful idiot, and I suspect there are many forces around the world that want to amplify my message." He acknowledged that his message may be intentionally spread, but did not revise his claims because of this.
If the inferences of the game theory are reliable, then the fact that the same method gets even the basic technical facts wrong in the Bitcoin problem is itself a problem that needs to be explained, but he has not yet responded to the technical background of his understanding of Bitcoin.
Two successful predictions, then Bitcoin.
Jiang Xueqin's name began to attract the attention of Western media around 2024. His YouTube channel, "Predictive History," which started as a course for students, later evolved into a geopolitical analysis channel. He predicted Trump's election in 2024 and the escalation of the US-Iran conflict through his "The Iran Trap" series, both of which subsequently occurred. Some Chinese media outlets therefore referred to him as "China's Nostradamus (prophet)."
His background is that he was born in Guangdong in 1976, immigrated to Toronto, Canada with his family at the age of 6, and obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature from Yale University in 1999.
He began teaching at Peking University High School in 1998 while still a Yale student, and subsequently worked as a part-time journalist in China, writing for Christian Science Monitor and Far Eastern Economic Review.
In 2002, he was arrested and deported for filming a PBS documentary about Chinese laborers. He later returned to China and turned to education reform, serving as the vice principal of Shenzhen Middle School and the director of the International Department of Peking University High School. He is currently a history and philosophy teacher at Moonshot Academy in Beijing.
His influence has grown significantly since appearing on Piers Morgan Uncensored and the Tucker Carlson Show, which explains why Professor Jiang's remarks can spread so quickly.
