The famed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who has been taking refuge in Moscow, was revealed as one of the six participants that played a role in the creation of the privacy-enhancing cryptocurrency Zcash (ZEC).
The famous whistleblower validated the revelation in an exclusive interview with Zcash Media.
The former United States defense contractor was one of the six participants, including Zcash creator Zooko Wilcox, Bitcoin core developer Peter Todd, and Coin Center’s Peter Van Valkenburgh, who each received a part of the private key needed to create Zcash.
Snowden’s identity was kept a secret all along and was known by the pseudonym “John Dobbertin.” He reportedly received no compensation, and his involvement was just for the public interest.
Snowden was granted asylum in Russia after he leaked 9,000 classified and unclassified documents, largely about the US spying on its own citizens. He has been a loud and vocal supporter of privacy-protecting technology.
Wilcox, the CEO of Electric Coin Company, started to work with Snowden in the fall of 2016. The exec then assigned the whistleblower the pseudonym as a tribute to Hans Dobbertin, the late German cryptographer best known for tracking down weaknesses in cryptographic algorithms and a member of the German Federal Office for Information Security.
Revealing his participation, Snowden, in the interview, said,
“The reason that I did that was I saw it being worked on by a number of trusted academic cryptographers. And I thought it was a very interesting project because when we look at cryptocurrencies in general, we generally see the cryptographic properties is being used to make sure it’s a fair ledger, but not that it’s been used to ensure that it’s a private ledger.
The problem with that is you can’t have free trade unless you have private trade and you can’t have a free society without a free trade.”
At the Orchid’s Priv8 Virtual Privacy Summit last month, Snowden said that “Bitcoin sucks” when it comes to financial privacy. He clarified that privacy is essential to help protect people from the dangers of having certain information in the wrong hands.
Featured Image Courtesy of BBC