Many governments regard crypto as an “evolving threat”, says whistleblower Edward Snowden. He believes that governments correctly perceive an evolving threat to traditional tools to which they have become accustomed.
Snowden, at the Camp Ethereal 2022 last week, said governments regard cryptocurrencies as a threat, as such are turning to regulation to stem it. He highlighted US’s “incredibly invasive” financial system. The whistleblower said it’s hard to believe that if the US’s financial network had the technical capacity to very easily get the serial number of every dollar bill that passes through their hands, that they do not.
Snowden says these characteristics undermine the popular presupposition that money is anonymous. The presupposition was inherited from a time when it meaningfully was. But it is no longer true. Bitcoin has a public ledger. The dollar has a private ledger that is available to the people performing financial surveillance. Snowden noted this as public to the private, but it’s more of the public to the prominent.
The whistleblower, who had leaked the highly classified information from the US National Security Agency in 2013, is a bitcoin critic. He is also critical of the traditional financial system. At the Ethereal Summit in 2021, Snowden said BTC must become “private by design”. He believes this would enable the popular crypto counter law enforcement efforts to crack down on fellow cryptocurrencies like Monero. This time around, Snowden said Ethereum suffers from the same kind of privacy problems as bitcoin.
In regards to bitcoin blockchain, he said chain analysis people are trying to get a financial edge out of the on-chain analysis. Snowden sees bitcoin blockchain as an even playing field.
