CoinDesk Held Its Annual ‘Consensus’ Conference This Week cryptocurrencies if bitcoin (BTC)† The well-known whistleblower and privacy advocate Edward Snowden was also present, albeit in digital form. He says he uses crypto as bitcoin “used to use,” not to invest in it.
Snowden different from crypto investors
Snowden is the well-known whistleblower who has revealed facts about mass surveillance. He generally does not encourage people to invest money in cryptocurrencies, and he emphasizes that this sets him apart from other people in the crypto community.
Snowden sees crypto more as a tool for value transfer in the future than an investment vehicle. He says that in 2013 he paid for his servers in bitcoins. He used the servers to pass on classified information about the NSA’s mass surveillance to journalists, without immediately revealing his identity.
Fan van privacy crypto
It’s a somewhat striking comment from one of the most outspoken and controversial whistleblowers in the world.
People are gradually learning that crypto like bitcoin are not exactly anonymous and that transactions can be traced by the authorities. The blockchain networks are often completely public.
Organizations such as the FBI were therefore able to quickly find stolen crypto in many cases, like the ransom the hacker demanded from the Colonial Pipeline last year† As a result, governments already have huge amounts of illegally obtained cryptocurrencies seizedwhich they auction off every now and then.
The whistleblower has therefore become critical of bitcoin and is especially a fan of so-called privacy coins such as monero (XMR) and zcash (ZEC). Those networks encrypt transactions in a way that makes them much more difficult to trace. Recently it came out that Snowden is the sixth anonymous founder of Zcash.
However, the metadata can be traced. “Think of it like a van with black windows on the highway,” says Snowden. “You can’t see who’s in it, but you can see where it came from, where it went and how long it took. We have to make sure that no one can observe the metadata.”
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