Yet you might (or might not) be surprised how many people have said this to me as a reason for not going down the rabbit hole.

Oh I bet. I've heard these theories for a while, and they always make me chuckle. Because you have to invent a whole story that justifies the notion that it was a government creation. And all these stories are based on absolutely no evidence. Just conspiritorial people spinning a yarn, pretending it's true.

Hehe I mean sure, government agencies created Tor, that's an established fact... Doesn't stop one from using it.

Tor was created by specific engineers and cryptographers within the Navy as a funded DARPA research project. That was never a secret, so right off the bat that's not a fair comparison to Bitcoin. There's no good reason to believe that Bitcoin was created by government.

Right yeah, I agree that the idea that the government created Bitcoin is ridiculous. I'm just saying that someone who doesn't use Bitcoin because they think the government had a hand in it is missing the point that, like Tor and the entire internet, these are all open source projects, and you can validate the code of everything.

We are absolutely on the same page. I was going to mention the fact that DARPA also created the internet, and everyone uses it. With tor, one of the prominent users of it was the CIA. To me, that's an endorsement of its security and credibility. Because if it was poorly constructed and had backdoors and such, the CIA wouldn't use it. So I take their use of it as almost an endorsement of its fidelity.

Yeah I mean if anything, the parts of the internet to be suspicious of are all of the major players, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc, who showed have all been either wittingly or unwittingly infiltrated by American intelligence agencies.

I'm old enough to remember when these entities either didn't exist, or didn't have a presence on the internet. With the possible exception of Microsoft. They came online relatively early but I can't recall if it before or after 1992, which was the year I transitioned from my BBS to the internet.