Second of all, do you suppose that anything in the Snowden leaks is news to me? Hahah.
First of all, this is a total non sequitur: What does intelligence agency infiltration via fully non-anoymous, real-world identifiable operatives of the exact types of bureaucratic processes you should know from “traditional finance” tell us about pseudonymous developers in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies?
For the most spectacular example: The (purported) authors of Dual EC DRBG, the people at NIST who standardized it, and the people at companies such as RSA and Microsoft who widely fielded it, were all not pseudonymous cypherpunks! What you are really demonstrating is that “identifiable” parties provide only a false sense of security.
https://projectbullrun.org/dual-ec/
I have also seen, e.g., some first-hand descriptions on the cryptography list of how IPSEC was made so bad. (Sorry, no links handy—enough time searching.) What appeared to be incompetence, design-by-committee stupidity, and bureaucratic inertia really turned out to be the product of… a secret conspiracy. From your “traditional finance” experience, the whole process probably would have looked entirely normal and mundane. Only “real name” identifiable parties were involved.
What has this to do with Bitcoin Core’s development process?
(From your edit as I was writing and searching for links:)
Your link shows that your style of “accountability” provides no protection whatsoever against nation-state threat actors.
Which weaknesses? Besides some major bugs that would have no discernible purpose for an intelligence agency, AFAIK, Bitcoin has had three major security flaws: A garden-variety integer overflow in 2010, which IIRC was purely Satoshi’s fault—the transaction malleability design flaw, also Satoshi’s fault, fixed by Segwit—and the unexploited miner inflation CVE in 2018, which was accidentally introduced by a “real name” identifiable party (Pieter Wuille, who claimed responsibility).
Sure, that’s a popular theory. In my opinion, it is a real “conspiracy theory” in the most negative sense. I don’t buy it. Have you ever examined the original code that Satoshi released? I linked to it in my first post on this thread. Another link, more prominent this time:
It looks to me like the product of a single eccentric genius, working very much alone on a project of breathtakingly huge scope. His public posts are also consistent with my opinion.
I think that some people just can’t believe (or don’t want to accredit) that yes, one lone individual can change the course of history by obeying the aphorism: Cypherpunks write code.
In fairness, I must ask if you have any thoughts on the benefits of pseudonymous developers who are de facto immune to legal attacks. This is no mere theory, when Craig Wright is now actively damaging Bitcoin Core development (and accordingly, also depriving Zcash of valuable improvements to its upstream).
Pseudonymous developers can simply ignore frivolous lawsuits. As a matter of Realpolitik, their presence also deters unjust laws and regulations: In practice, the prospective cost of enforcement decreases the likelihood of adverse legislation or regulation. I think that’s important for Bitcoin—and in the long term, potentially even more important for Zcash.