Not to be pedantic but money is not "based primarily on new mortgages". I agree with you that we have a serious problem but incorrect assignations of blame paralyse our actual ability to solve the issue.

Back when countries all existed on the gold standard, governments needed to be able to back their currency with huge volumes of gold in reserves. In order to trust that a government's money was worth anything they needed to have sufficient gold in reserves they could potentially pay it out if money holders wanted gold instead. However, most governments began transitioning off the gold standard around the 1970s meaning that they had no need to hold enormous gold in reserves.

So why is the United States still holding so much gold when Canada is not? It costs a ridiculous amount of money to hold onto gold. You need a facility to keep it in, you need to guard it and the gold doesn't really do anything for you while you're holding it. Canada has realized that instead of paying all this money to hold, they can sell it and buy bonds, assets that don't cost any money to keep and actually make you money. The United States on the other hand keeps most of its reserves in Fort Knox, a military facility that they would still be paying for with or without gold because it guards numerous other secrets.

What Tor does isn't technically illegal. Just because Tor is frequently used for illegal activity doesn't make the creators of Tor culpable for the illegal activity that happens on it. You wouldn't arrest a Toyota executive if it was found out that Toyotas were the most popular vehicle for drug smuggling, would you. Not unless the executive was specifically marketing to or enabling drug dealers.

The United States could probably introduce legislation that would make Tor illegal and then spend the decades working with other countries to try and get it shut down. However by the time they got any of that legislation Tor would be changed just enough to be legal or would be replaced by a copycat that did follow the new legal guidelines.

Well nobody knows because no historians wrote down the process when it was invented. That said, it was probably just invented on accident. Some cheese people were storing in a cave got accidentally inoculated and someone tried it and went "huh, this didn't make me sick and tastes pretty good. I'll add some to the rest of the cheese I'm storing too!".