During a recent interview with Edward Snowden at Blockstack Berlin, it was revealed that Snowden indeed had been using bitcoin as a means of payment because of its privacy.
Edward Snowden is known for leaking documents revealing the extent of NSA’s ability to spy on people. Anyone’s private messages could be accessed merely by knowing their e-mail address, even Obama’s mail could be spied upon. Many other documents were also leaked to major media outlets, including evidence that the NSA had access to databases of major IT companies including Microsoft, Facebook & Google.
Edward Snowden is known throughout the world as an advocate for the protection of peoples’ privacy. Because of this, Snowden is an important figure in the cryptocurrency community, as it also focuses on keeping transactions private. In a recent interview at the Blockstack event in Berlin, Snowden had this to say when asked about bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.
As a privacy advocate, I would recommend no one ever say that they have cryptocurrencies
He later added that he might or might not have used bitcoin as a means of payment when setting up his own server infrastructure back in 2013. Currently, Snowden is particularly excited about Zcash because of its privacy properties. Monero was another cryptocurrency Snowden also utilized, because of its privacy.
In the interview, Snowden expresses his concerns surrounding the behavior of the cryptocurrency community, instead of being on the same team, many fights against each other and see other cryptocurrencies as an enemy to their own favorite. Instead, Snowden suggests that the entire cryptocurrency community stand together and fight against governments, centralized institutions and regulators.
Lastly, Snowden gave his opinion on the bitcoin blockchain, he doesn’t see it as a scalable solution as having a public record of everyone’s’ transaction history forever could cause issues. He suggests that there might be better alternatives out there, giving a comparison to previous technological advancement, stating that the first internet browser created isn’t the best.
Full interview below, bitcoin & cryptocurrency segment starts around 43 minutes.
Image Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUhFf6K-SU8&ab_channel=Blockstack