A viral clip from Episode 86 of the Jack Neel Podcast has ignited heated debate across X, TikTok, and crypto forums. In it, Jack Xueqin Jiang — a Chinese-Canadian high school history teacher who runs the YouTube channel 'Predictive History' — claims that Bitcoin was created by the CIA under the direction of the 'deep state' as a surveillance and covert funding tool. As of April 2026, Jiang's channel boasts 2.3 million subscribers, and the theory's resurgence is closely tied to his growing influence.
Jiang's Theory: Game Theory & Three Questions
Jiang structures his argument around three questions: Who has the technical capability to build Bitcoin? Who benefits from a transparent ledger? And why would anyone build it and give it away for free? His answers consistently point to DARPA, NSA, and the CIA. 'When you run a game theory analysis, you examine all possibilities and it ultimately points to the deep state, to the CIA,' he says in the clip. He cites DARPA's role in building ARPANET as precedent, and argues that Bitcoin's public blockchain is not a privacy tool but a permanent record for intelligence agencies to mine indefinitely. Jiang also suggests that the Winklevoss twins' early Bitcoin investment after their Facebook settlement indicates they had inside knowledge of the asset's true origin. Host Jack Neel responds with laughter and brief affirmations, without challenging the claims.
Predictive Halo vs. Technical Flaws
Jiang gained fame by accurately predicting Trump's 2024 election victory and the subsequent U.S.-Iran conflict. His geo-political lectures have gone viral, fueling his subscriber growth. However, critics point to fundamental flaws in his theory. Bitcoin's design, as outlined in the 2008 whitepaper, explicitly aims to eliminate trusted third parties in financial transactions — the opposite of what a surveillance infrastructure requires. The codebase is fully open-source and maintained by a global community of volunteers for over 17 years, contradicting the idea of a secret agency operation. The cypherpunk lineage behind Bitcoin, including Hal Finney and Wei Dai, is well-documented and predates any known intelligence community interest in decentralized digital cash. A widely circulated rebuttal video, 'Professor Jiang Doesn't Understand Bitcoin,' details technical errors in his understanding of miner economics, decentralization, and on-chain privacy.
Furthermore, Jiang's broader geopolitical thesis — that U.S. decline will drive capital into hard assets like Bitcoin — contradicts his 'CIA creation' narrative, which simultaneously frames Bitcoin as a symptom of American overreach and a beneficiary of its demise.