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You're placing way more value on this than makes sense: Bitcoin makes use of good primitives, but no better than any expected familiar with the SoTA in the late 2000s would have selected for a greenfield project.

Maybe the most unusual primitive selection in Bitcoin is secp256k1 for ECDSA, instead of one of the more common NIST curves. But even that is understandable, given that Nakamoto was active in the cypherpunk community and concern around the constants used in the NIST curves was a common discussion item at the time.



The primitive selection looks rather informed with the hindsight of NSA compromising the security of NIST curves


As far as I know, there's no concrete evidence that the NSA has compromised the security of the NIST curves. That would be weird for them to do, since they use those curves internally to encrypt data classified at Secret and higher.

Are you thinking of Dual EC?




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