Edward Snowden, the former CIA employee who leaked classified information from the United States National Security Agency (NSA) about its spying programs, answered questions at the Internet Engineering Task Force 93 meeting. In one particular part of the Q&A session, Snowden was asked about the peer-to-peer decentralized digital currency bitcoin, which has fallen from grace over the past year.
Snowden was asked by somebody about his opinion regarding bitcoin or products/services similar to the virtual currency and how they can help make market transactions become anonymized.
He started off by noting that the general public likes to avoid discussing bitcoin. Although he believes there are various “informed concepts” about bitcoin, he does think “bitcoin by itself is flawed.” This may draw the ire of many diehard bitcoiners on the Internet.
“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,” explained Snowden.
With that being said, Snowden listed a number of interesting elements behind bitcoin that “particularly when we start to combine them with that idea like before of tokenization, of concepts like proof of work.” Snowden also alluded to “inaudible mixed in networks” to provide multiple steps in bitcoins that is another pertinent part of the crytopcurrency.
In the end, however, Snowden thinks we shouldn’t be honing in too much on bitcoin. It’s a mistake, says Snowden.
“But focusing too much on Bitcoin, I think, is a mistake. The real solution is again, how do we get to a point where you don’t have to have a direct link between your identity all of the time? You have personas. 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.”
At the time of this writing, bitcoin is trading at around $250, a number it has been valued at for quite sometime.
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