>>13372
To be exact, the cryptography behind Bitcoin has been designed by NSA and Certicom (a private company). You need to break both ciphers to be able to steal well secured Bitcoin (if you want to do it by attacking the cryptography). The network is public and there's a great bounty to anyone who manages to do that, yet for now we have no information that someone did it, otherwise something like a market value could show some discrepancy. We hear every now or then about a high profile Bitcoin heist, but it's never been about someone breaking either NSA's or Certicom's cipher. I'm not saying it will never happen (quantum computers will happen one day and that event will change the cryptography landscape a lot), but until now it probably didn't.

Every store of value has its strengths and weaknesses, but it's much much harder to erase your well secured Bitcoin amount than a virtual number in your bank account. If anything, it's much easier to attack a market value of Bitcoin. A wise move would be to not put all eggs in one basket anyway. It's still possible to buy precious metals - that's as independent of Federal Reserve as Bitcoin, or maybe, as some suggest here, even more. Or maybe even better, invest some value in your offspring.

And finally, the cryptography is not only about protecting the data from (some) government. It's also about protecting it from your business competition. A market value of Bitcoin can serve as a canary. If Bitcoin is worthless then everyone can decrypt everything. But I would doubt such a situation would happen during the next few years.