In an online participation last weekend during the Consensus 2022 conference, an event promoted by Coindesk in Austin, Texas, the United States, the former CIA systems analyst and former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden highlighted that he used Bitcoin ( BTC) for payments to servers through a pseudonym maintained by him, since, for him, the cryptocurrency is to be used for payments and not as an investment option.
Exiled since 2013 in Russia after leaking details of NSA global surveillance, which earned the whistleblower an indictment from the US government for theft of national defense information, Snowden also defended the cryptocurrency industry by rejecting a document signed by tech pundits against the cryptocurrency charter that was introduced in the US Congress earlier this month.
Calling some of the signers “prolific public trolls,” the president of the Foundation for Press Freedom argued that they were misunderstanding cryptocurrencies and repeating old accusations against the industry.
“The letter is an argument for the status quo. There are many ways to address all your concerns. All the people who signed this latest one could understand this industry. They certainly should,” Edward Snowden said while expressing his admiration for the professor of Harvard Bruce Schneier, one of the signatories of the letter.
He also explained one of the reasons why he believes that he does not approach the cryptocurrency community as, for him, cryptocurrencies should be used strictly as a form of payment.
“In general, I don’t encourage people to put their money into crypto as a technology and that’s what distances me from a lot of people in the community,” he added.
Snowden, who received a permanent residence permit in 2020, avoided discussing the war between Russia and Ukraine. He also said that there have been advances related to internet privacy with the progress of encrypting the content of communications, although he expressed concern. by tracking activities, metadata.
“Think of it like a van going down the road. You can’t see who the passengers are, but you can see where the van came from, where it ended up, how long it took… that kind of thing. We have to make sure that nobody can observe that level. We have to do more similar transactions, so that everyone drives the same type of vans and gets lost in the crowd, “he concluded.
In April, Edward Snowden revealed that he was one of six people who helped launch Zcash, a decentralized blockchain that uses zero-knowledge proofs in its transactions. ZEC transactions cannot be tracked and the values transmitted cannot be determined, Cointelegraph reports.
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