Whistleblower Edward Snowden: Governments Are Threatened By Crypto

Governments view cryptocurrencies as an "evolving threat" that is putting the future of their control over the financial system in serious danger, according to Edward Snowden. 

What Happened: In a Tuesday report by crypto news outlet Decrypt, Snowden said that "governments correctly perceive an evolving threat to traditional tools which they’ve grown accustomed to" during a recent interview conducted by Marta Belcher, president of Filecoin Foundation and general counsel at Protocol Labs, at Camp Ethereal 2022 last week.

He added that cryptocurrencies are a danger to the government's "ability to impose regulation upon private lives, and more broadly, private trade."

Snowden described the United States financial system as "incredibly invasive," and said that it is hard for him "to believe that if they had the technical capacity to very easily get the serial number of every dollar bill that passes through their hands, that they do not."

After suggesting that cash is no longer anonymous, he also added that Bitcoin BTC/USD has a public ledger that is similar to the banking ledger, but it levels the playing field by being public instead of limiting access to select parties.

The whistleblower also criticized Bitcoin over its lack of privacy-preserving features and added that Ethereum ETH/USD "suffers from the same sort of privacy problems as Bitcoin," with which "you get chain analysis people and whatnot who are doing fairly devious things with it" such as "trying to get a financial edge out of the on-chain analysis."

Snowden said that "what people are really missing" is how cryptocurrencies are disruptive to the current power relationships.

Edward Snowden speaking to attendees at Revolution 2021. Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia.