Bitcoin Forum

Edward Snowden, who became notorious for exposing the U.S. National Security Agency's (NSA) massive surveillance agenda in 2013, has said bitcoin's central flaw may not lie in its transaction rate limitations, but in its public ledger.

Speaking to the audience via webcam at a Blockstack event in Berlin early March, Snowden for the first time gave the audience his detailed views on the emerging technology. While agreeing that bitcoin will endure for a long period of time, Snowden argued that he does not believe "bitcoin will last forever."

"Everybody is focused on the transaction rate limitations of bitcoin being its central flaw, and that is a major one," he said, adding that, actually, "the much larger structural flaw, the long-lasting flaw, is its public ledger."

https://www.coindesk.com/edward-snowden-public-ledger-is-bitcoins-big-flaw/

Is this geezer being paid by Zcash? He rolls that out every time.

I'm not hugely interested in his opinion on this subject. He has no track record in this area.

The way things are developing I'd say the public aspect proved to be a pretty pragmatic move in terms of keeping the authorities mollified. If Bitcoin had Monero's qualities they would've gone all out to squash its interaction with fiat. I don't think they've had the time to figure out what stuff like XMR really represents.

Let's see what second layers bring in terms of privacy. Most seem to assume everyone's daily business will happen on the raw blockchain when that'll never be possible.

Understanding where Edward comes from it is known that he is a true believer in privacy and security. Bitcoin transactions on the public ledger although not really anonymous, do facilitate cross border transactions. The change that public blockchain technology has brought is that the currency can atleast be legalized in countries that fear that money laundering and anonymous transactions can take place without their consent. In the case of Bitcoin, since it's a public ledger and that exchanges can be tracked for transactions, countries have legalized it without having much to worry about. Also, if privacy is the real concern, we can calm ourselves down and also think about the future enhancements planned in the Bitcoin roadmap. The Lightning network itself takes transactions off the blockchain and users can follow privacy guidelines while transactino on that network and finally broadcast just the final closing channel transaction on the blockchain. There's also going to be confidential transactions in a couple of years in Bitcoin (the reasearch is already happening) and this should hide transaction amounts from the Blockchain and Dandelion project to hide bitcoin nodes IP's.

Public ledger is Bitcoin big point for mass adoption. For security and anonymity reason we have another coins, and yes, Edward, it's not a Zcash.

He definitely seems to be pushing some privacy-focused altcoin with statements like this. Those who want to improve anonymity while using Bitcoin always have the option of using mixers or coinjoin transactions to do so. There is no reason to go to another alt, when Bitcoin has the widest acceptance among cryptocurrencies.

Everyone has their own point of view and one should respect that but it also does not mean that the system is wrong. I know Public Ledger may be bad as it will not help to keep your finical secrets but that is the main catch of this system. Bitcoin has created an anonymous system where everyone is equal and there account details and transactions are open to everyone, hence reducing the chances of internal corruption inside the system.

i see where he's coming from. a lot of security researchers are turned off by BTC's utter lack of privacy. i'd like to think that we can expand on BTC's easily verifiable proof-of-work to include better privacy features.


fair enough. how about someone like matthew green (zcash)?


is that what they've done with monero, though? i suppose it's true that legit exchanges are too scared to touch it. it seems like the only fiat exchange (that you can actually deposit/withdraw fiat from---removing bitfinex) that offers XMR markets is kraken. i guess there's bithumb, but not sure i'd call them legit.


what's stopping tumblebit development? i was under the impression that it didn't require any major consensus change.

He's most definitely being paid by them, because there's no reason why any privacy advocate would choose Zcash over Monero, since there's so many criticism of Zcash from cryptography experts. And as for Bitcoin, privacy hasn't been a priority yet, but developers are starting giving it more attention, so it's too early to say now that other coins are going to replace Bitcoin in the future.

The point here is that Bitcoin was not, is not and will never be perfect. And on that matter, nothing can be. Of course, every coin or cryptocurrency has its own advantages and disadvantages and one's advantage can be viewed as a disadvantage by some people and vice versa. What Snowden is really pushing is the big idea of privacy and maybe he is thinking that it must be central to any coin for it to be categorized as a "forever" coin. Knowing his story and the things he went through, this stand can be understandable.