How Bitcoin and Crypto Primed Us for Digital Slavery

There is something no one in the cryptocurrency world has been able to answer. It is not a technical flaw. It is not a question of regulation or adoption. It is something far simpler, yet far more dangerous.

Where did this all come from?

How did the most transformative financial system of the modern era appear out of nowhere, fully formed, using cryptographic tools developed by one of the most secretive intelligence agencies in the world?

To understand what may be coming, we must go back before the first Bitcoin was ever mined. In 1996, the United States National Security Agency released a research paper titled How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash. Authored by three cryptographers working within the NSA, the paper described in detail how to create a digital currency. It explained the architecture, the protocols, the mathematics. It outlined how to use public key cryptography, blind signatures, digital wallets, and networked systems to conduct anonymous, untraceable financial transactions.

It also explained how to revoke that anonymity when necessary.

This paper was not a random academic exercise. It was a framework. And more than a decade later, a global financial system would be built almost identically to its design.

That system is called cryptocurrency.

At the core of this system is a cryptographic function called SHA-256. It powers Bitcoin. It secures the blockchain. It verifies transactions. It ensures the integrity of every coin that has ever been created.

SHA-256 was designed by the NSA. This is not speculation. It is a matter of public record. It was released in 2001 as part of the Secure Hash Algorithm family. Today it is used not just in cryptocurrency, but in government systems, military networks, financial encryption, and commercial data security across the world.

This fact alone should cause pause. The cryptographic backbone of a supposedly decentralized and rebellious financial technology was built by the very agency most known for surveillance, control, and information warfare.

It is worth remembering what Edward Snowden revealed to the world. He showed that the NSA does not simply spy on individuals. It shapes the systems we use. It installs hidden vulnerabilities in global infrastructure. It creates encryption protocols and then builds ways to break them.

Snowden’s documents revealed that the NSA had secretly influenced encryption standards used worldwide. One of the most damning examples was a random number generator that the NSA pushed into global cryptographic use. The algorithm was flawed by design. It allowed those who knew the flaw to predict the outcome of cryptographic keys. That meant encryption used in everything from emails to banking could be bypassed. The NSA not only knew this. It had inserted the flaw on purpose.

What Snowden proved is that the NSA does not need to defeat strong encryption by brute force. It simply gets involved early enough in the design process to insert vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities are invisible to the public and to most cybersecurity professionals. Yet they provide full access to the agency that placed them.

If the NSA had the power to do this to a random number generator, it is not irrational to ask whether it did the same with SHA-256. If the NSA created this algorithm, then it had every opportunity to structure it in a way that others could not detect weaknesses, even with open source access.

Over three trillion dollars of global wealth has moved through cryptocurrency markets built on this foundation. The trust in the system is absolute. But it is a trust placed in code that came from a building in Fort Meade.

It is also a trust placed in an origin story no one can verify.

Bitcoin appeared suddenly in 2008. A whitepaper was posted online. It used the very cryptographic mechanisms the NSA had been exploring for over a decade. The name on the paper was unfamiliar. There was no face. No past. No interviews. Just a name and an idea. And then the name vanished.

No one has ever proven who created Bitcoin.

That is not a minor detail. That is the single point from which all of this extends. The technology we are being told will save us from the centralized control of governments may have been created, supported, and allowed to grow by those very same forces.

There is no reasonable explanation for why a government obsessed with control and compliance would allow an anonymous digital currency to thrive unless it served a larger purpose.

In the international bestseller It Starts With Gold, written by Peter J. Merrick and Adrian C. Spitters, this entire sequence is explored in detail. The authors trace the path from the NSA’s early work on digital cash, to the deployment of cryptocurrencies, and finally to the endgame of Central Bank Digital Currencies. They ask whether Bitcoin and its imitators were introduced not to liberate individuals, but to prepare them for something far more dangerous.

The introduction of digital assets was not a rebellion. It was a rehearsal.

The next phase is already underway.

Central Bank Digital Currencies are being developed and tested in almost every major economy. These are not like cryptocurrencies. They are not decentralized. They are not anonymous. They are programmable. They can be restricted. They can expire. They can be frozen.

CBDCs are money that can obey instructions. And the instructions do not come from the user.

The World Economic Forum has published extensive reports on this shift. Their documents openly promote programmable digital currency as a tool for enforcing environmental, social, and governance compliance. The UN’s Digital Finance Task Force connects digital wallets to identity systems and personal behavior tracking. Their Agenda 2030 lays the foundation for a system in which access to money is conditional on meeting approved behavioral targets.

The term used is social credit.

China has already implemented it. The system monitors what individuals say, buy, post, and believe. It rewards compliance. It punishes deviation. Travel restrictions. Employment blocks. Denied access to education, healthcare, or even the ability to spend.

The West is following the same path. Under different language. With different packaging.

But the function is identical.

CBDCs will be tied to identity. Identity will be linked to behavior. Behavior will be measured and scored. And your score will determine your access to money.

This is not future theory. It is current policy.

Now step back and look at the full picture.

Bitcoin trained the world to go cashless. It taught individuals to use digital wallets. It popularized QR codes for payments. It introduced scarcity in digital form. It normalized transactions across the blockchain. It made the language of decentralization and cryptography part of everyday life.

It did the work of softening the population to the idea that money no longer needed to be physical. That privacy could be sacrificed for speed. That intermediaries could be replaced by algorithms.

And it built trust in a system that could now be replaced with one that allows no escape.

When cryptocurrencies are no longer useful, when they are hacked, discredited, taxed, or banned, the alternative will already be prepared.

A digital currency that offers convenience and compliance.

A currency that cannot be held, only accessed. 

A system where money does not belong to you. It is leased through obedience.

This is what It Starts With Gold warns about in stark detail. The authors argue that the real wealth will be in what cannot be programmed, frozen, or erased. Tangible assets. Physical control. True ownership. Not digital promises, but lasting value.

We have reached a point where everything that made us believe we were gaining freedom may have been part of a plan to take it away.

Read the NSA’s paper. Read the whitepapers of the World Economic Forum. Read the UN’s Agenda 2030. Read It Starts With Gold.

Look at what has been built.

The grid is already live. The switch is waiting. And the next time you open your wallet, it may not ask what you want to spend.

It may ask who you are. And whether you still deserve to have access at all.

This article is only the beginning. If you want to understand how your financial security is being systematically dismantled and how to protect your family’s future, we urge you to read It Starts With Gold.

We wrote this book to expose what has been hidden in plain sight and to give national citizens a roadmap out of a collapsing financial paradigm. You will not hear this on the evening news. But you will see it unfold, one margin call at a time.

You can order a copy of It Starts With Gold now on Amazon and start reclaiming control of your wealth before the next financial crisis becomes the next financial confiscation.

📘 It Starts With Gold: The #1 International Bestseller by Peter J. Merrick and Adrian C. Spitters. Now available on Amazon → Buy here