"Bitcoin does not require trust. Anyone can review the code, and run whichever version they desire, as long as it obeys the rules that everyone else agrees to. Who cares who designed it... How about the number 0? Can you trust that 0 is a valid concept and not a trick, if you don't know who came up with the idea?"

My counter-argument to that statement, is: Do you trust that the NSA didn't build in a backdoor into SHA-256? Or are you a mathematician, and have you verified this extensively yourself, especially considering they already did this with Dual EC DRBG? The only statements I can find are "the cryptographic community *TRUSTS* in SHA-256 for security". That's a dangerous game you're playing with an NSA asset.