Former NSA contractor and alleged information leak Edward Snowden recently shared his thoughts on the cryptocurrency bitcoin and its flaws. Although he pointed out the disadvantages of the network, he also had some positive remarks as well.
For one, Snowden mentioned that “the protocol has a lot of weaknesses and transaction sides and a lot of weaknesses that structurally make it vulnerable to people who are trying to own 50 percent of the network and so on and so forth.”
Snowden Comments on Bitcoin
“But when we think about the basic principles behind it, there are some very interesting things that particularly when we start to combine them with that idea like before of tokenization, of concepts like proof of work,” he added.
Of course Snowden also put some focus on the issue of privacy, as bitcoin transactions are practically anonymous. After all, the verification takes place through the network of computers solving complex algorithms to update the blockchain or distributed public ledger.
Snowden mentioned that focusing on the cryptocurrency itself could be a mistake, as he discussed methods in which true privacy can be enabled. “You have tokens that authenticate each person and when you want to be able to interact with people as your persona in your true name, you can do so. When you want to be able to switch to a persona – a common persona, an anonymous persona, a shared persona, you can do that. When you want to move to pseudonymous persona, you can do that,” he explained.
He added that it would be possible to wash user data from bitcoin in a way to provide a level of anonymity not currently seen, explaining that there may be a way to implement a process with multiple steps as used with the Tor browser.
