Snowden: "The biggest Bitcoin flaw is privacy"

Edward Snowden, the NSA-whistleblower who achieved international fame after revealing his organization’s shocking surveillance agenda in 2013, thinks that Bitcoin has a problem.

Snowden said that although “everybody is focused on the transaction rate limitations of bitcoin being its central flaw,” that actually, “the much larger structural flaw, the long-lasting flaw, is its public ledger.”

Snowden explained that the idea of a public ledger “is simply incompatible with having an enduring mechanism for trade.”

“You cannot have a lifelong history of everyone’s purchases, all of the interactions be available to everyone and have that work out well at scale,” he said.

He does believe that other cryptocurrencies with more advanced privacy and security features have brighter futures: “Zcash for me is the most interesting right now, because the privacy properties of it are truly unique.”

Bitcoin was once lauded as the most anonymous way to pay for anything on the internet–it was the currency-of-choice on the infamous Silk Road network, and has been criticised as a tool for money-laundering and funding terrorists. Every wallet on the Bitcoin network has a public address that can be regarded as a “pseudonymous” identity. The further that Bitcoin users can keep their pseudonymous identities from their real-world identities, the more anonymous their identities will be.

However, this is often easier said than done–IP addresses can be traced, transactional patterns can be identified, and other factors can make it possible for law enforcement authorities or even just curious members of the public to identify who a particular wallet address belongs to.

Source: Finance Magnates

Original post: Edward Snowden’s Big Problem With Bitcoin Is Privacy, Not Scalability

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