Snowden Says Governments See Crypto As An “Evolving Threat”

Edward Snowden says governments see crypto as an “evolving threat”, during Camp Ethereal 2022 where he also talked about the regulatory issues regarding crypto and this industry so let’s read more in today’s latest crypto news.

Whistleblower Edward Snowden says governments see crypto as an evolving threat and gave a short interview to Marta Belcher who is the president of Filecoin Foundation and the general counsel at Protocol Labs. Snowden said:

“I think governments correctly perceive an evolving threat to traditional tools which they’ve grown accustomed to. in terms of an ability to impose regulation upon private lives, and more broadly, private trade.”

Snowden took further aim at the invasive US Financial system:

“When you think about the way the U.S. incredibly invasive financial network operates, with all of these anti-money laundering and know-your-customer impositions, it is hard for me 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.”

The characteristics undermine the popular opinion that money is more anonymous:

“We have this presupposition that cash is anonymous, that we have inherited from a time when it meaningfully was. That is no longer true. When you think about Bitcoin having a public ledger, well, once a dollar enters the banking system, there is a private ledger that is available to the people who are performing financial surveillance. So it’s really just private to the public, but it’s public to the prominent, shall we say.”

Snowden is vastly critical of Bitcoin for the same reasons he is critical of the traditional financial system. During last year’s Camp Ethereal Summit, Snowden said that BTC became private by design to counter the law enforcement efforts and crack down on other cryptocurrencies like the privacy-based ones. During this year, he said that Ethereum suffers from the same privacy issues as BTC. He called Bitcoins blockchain an “even playing field “ and said none of his privacy complaints stopped him from seeing the power of crypto:

“What people are really missing as they get down in the weeds is how transformative the power relationships are, or how much the power relationships are going to transform, as we move from these legacy technologies to these sort of future decentralized technologies.”