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Edward Snowden has again made headlines commenting on the privacy of Bitcoin. The whistleblower who exposed a secret surveillance program of American citizens has some serious reservations concerning the oldest cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin is Not Private Enough: Edward Snowden
Edward Snowden is one of the foremost privacy advocates in the world. According to him
“Bitcoin isn’t private enough—and that an upcoming software update could make it worse.”
However, some Bitcoin developers and privacy advocates disagreed with his assessment.
His comments have surely created an uproar from fellow activists such as Alex Gladstein, the Chief Strategy Officer of the Human Rights Foundation, who thinks “Snowden has misrepresented the upgrade.”
Respect @Snowden for his work on privacy and criticism of CBDCs. But this clip is a disaster. TLDR:
-Taproot makes Bitcoin privacy worse
-Lightning is "shenanigans"
-Attacks core devs
-Hypes NFTs + privacy coins (except Monero which he trashes)When SnowdenCoin? Say it ain't so pic.twitter.com/xQtoGyCEHV
— Alex Gladstein (@gladstein) May 8, 2021
Others have argued that,
“The Russian exile can’t see the importance of mainstream adoption to the project, which could falter if it turns too far toward anonymity.”
Snowden while talking to Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Marta Belcher mentioned that.
“Cryptocurrency, and by this, I’m just going to say Bitcoin, is really failing comprehensively, terribly, on the privacy angle.” Taproot, he added, isn’t a good fix.
Researchers Take on The Privacy of The Coin
Several developers and researchers shared their take on Snowden’s comments, mentioning that Taproot was incorrect. Gladstein said that Snowden misunderstands Taproot. He says,
“With great respect for Edward Snowden, who has sacrificed so much to reveal the surveillance state to the world, I disagree with his assessment of Bitcoin privacy and hope he can consider looking more deeply into the Taproot upgrade and existing privacy tools like CoinJoin and Lightning.”
Gladstein also said;
“Snowden’s swipe at Bitcoin developers’ priorities was wrong. They are in fact constrained by Bitcoin’s users, who will not accept any software upgrades which ruin Bitcoin’s auditability, backward compatibility, or stability. The developers can’t just do whatever they want, they have to carefully design solutions that don’t sacrifice the values which make Bitcoin so important in the first place, namely, decentralized digital scarcity and the ability for users to control the system, not corporations or governments. This arrangement means that Bitcoin cannot put experimental cryptography onto the main chain today.”