In a dialog with podcast host Anthony Pompliano, Michael Ellis—just lately sworn in as Deputy Director of the US Central Intelligence Company (CIA)—provided an unusually forthright evaluation of Bitcoin’s function contained in the national-security equipment.
Why The CIA Is Excited About Bitcoin
Ellis started by acknowledging the parable that Bitcoin is totally nameless. “People may have thought Bitcoin was anonymous,” he instructed Pompliano, “but I’d say it’s pseudonymous, right? It’s not truly anonymous.” That distinction, he continued, has flipped early legal enthusiasm into an surprising boon for investigators. “We are … excited as well because … there’s a lot of work that we do with law enforcement to try to track illicit crypto payments by bad actors.”
The Deputy Director refused to single out Bitcoin as uniquely harmful. “Bad actors, whether they’re drug cartels or terrorist groups or outlaw regimes, use cryptocurrency, but they used other tools as well,” he mentioned, itemizing “dollars,” “cars,” and even “toner cartridges for their printers” as mundane equivalents. “Doesn’t mean we say we should ban all of those.”
Ellis then delivered the road that can echo via coverage circles: “Bitcoin is here to stay. Cryptocurrency is here to stay.” Institutional adoption, he argued, is now an irreversible “trend … one that this administration has obviously been leaning forward into.” For the intelligence group, the stakes are geopolitical. “It’s another area of technological competition where we need to make sure the United States is well positioned against China and other adversaries … we need to make sure that we are a leader in these fields internationally and not a laggard.”
Pompliano pressed him on the dual-use nature of open-source cost rails. Ellis embraced that framing. “We use technology as a tool, and Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are another tool in the toolbox. It’s also a target,” he defined, noting that the blockchain ledger can concurrently “disrupt our adversaries’ use” of funds and “collect more intelligence to gather more information about them.”
Behind the operational discuss lies a tradition battle enjoying out inside Langley. “There’s a little bit of a generational shift and a cultural shift going on that Director Burns and I are leading the way on,” Ellis conceded. “Not everyone in government … has these attitudes around new technologies. People are sort of trapped in an older mindset sometimes and we have to break through that and realize this idea that cryptocurrency is for people who have something to hide— that’s just not right.”
Pompliano laughed that Ellis appeared like “the in-house Bitcoiner.” If the Deputy Director’s remarks show something, it’s that the CIA not regards Bitcoin merely as a curiosity on the darkish internet. As a substitute, the company views it as a everlasting fixture of world finance—concurrently a surveillance vector, an intelligence useful resource, and, maybe, a aggressive area by which nationwide energy might be measured.
At press time, BTC traded at $95,132.
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