Edward Snowden Reveals His Role in Zcash Launch

Edward Snowden has revealed that he was the one behind the pseudonym John Dobbertin that participated in the Zcash ceremony. Snowden said that he participated out of goodwill and was not paid.

Whistleblower Edward Snowden has revealed that he was one of the six individuals who launched the privacy coin Zcash. Snowden made the announcement in a YouTube video on the Zcash Media channel, confirming that he was the “John Dobbertin” that participated in the Zcash ceremony.

“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..”

Snowden does say that he was never paid and had no stake, doing it more out of public interest. He then went on to say that the problem with Bitcoin’s open ledger, as opposed to a private ledger like Zcash, was that you couldn’t have truly free trade, saying,

“The problem with [an open ledger] is that you can’t have truly free trade unless you have private trade. And you can’t have a free society without free trade ”

Snowden has long made his interest in privacy coins known, and it’s all the more clear now as to why. He has also warned against investing in meme tokens for the sake of making a quick buck after the price of Shiba Inu spiked in late 2021.

He is a fairly common name in the crypto space, as his interest in it has also extended to NFTs and commentary on various matters. Furthermore, he auctioned an NFT titled on the Foundation platform and also said in 2020 that many people were buying bitcoin because of too much panic and too little reason.

How are privacy coins faring in the wake of regulation?

Privacy coins are a very controversial topic in the larger world, as governments fear that they may be used to fund and facilitate illicit activity. As such, some countries have banned privacy coins, most notably South Korea.

Privacy has been one of the key concerns for crypto-enthusiasts. One ECB executive even went so far as to say that the digital euro can protect privacy better than crypto.

But privacy coin projects remain hard at work on their technologies. There has even been something of a resurgence for them in recent times, with Monero and Zcash performing well in March.