Topic: Edward Snowden Final Warning for Bitcoin - page 5. (Read 1767 times)

That's fear talking. Fear like this is the reason North Korea is what it is today, a hell hole with absolutely no privacy.

Everyone needs privacy, everyone loves privacy. Even Satoshi wanted to add it.
And now because of some bag of shit called "Elizabeth" and alike, you don't want it ?


That's not true and other privacy projects are a proof that economy outside DNM's is growing, I pay for many things using private cryptocurrency and it's not DNM related.

Monero beats Bitcoin on ShopinBit
https://twitter.com/shopinbit/status/1775930595731775991

Monero beats Bitcoin on Coincards
https://twitter.com/CoinCards/status/1610105220138405889

Now you can buy anything from Amazon using Monero
https://monezon.com/

Some recent businesses from Lebanon
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/19dmsvz/1st_business_shop_in_my_town_accept_the_adoption/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/19dmupj/2nd_business_start_to_accept_monero_as_payment/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/1cju2pk/3rd_business_in_lebanon_accepting_monero_as/

That's just few examples but of course, you personally may prefer no privacy and higher cost of transacting.

It's a free world (still) and as much as I respect Bitcoin for what it did, I prefer to use other means for transacting and storing my money.
I don't like random dude on twitter yelling to the whole world that I made a huge transfer or for the government to know how much I have and possibly wanting to tax me for the crypto I didn't even trade to FIAT.

Without financial privacy you may put in danger your family members, criminals may (and already did) kidnap and request ransom because they knew exactly how much money certain people have.

The fact that someone is arguing against privacy is insane for me, pure insanity.

If somehow my amount of wealth would leak to the public, I would need to change my name and move out to another country - Me and my family would be in constant danger.
People act like there's no evil, like privacy is just a fancy gimmick.. but very evil people do exist and they are just waiting for the opportunity.

For many people privacy and no privacy is a life and death difference.
Privacy = Safety, you don't want more safety ? it's like driving without your seat belts on.

I'm up for it.

Let's start by implementing CoinJoin at a protocol level, with the new TapScript functionality. Time to utilize it for more than just JPEGs.

We are heading into a world where Everybody is about to be able to see your financial transaction history. Even random anonymous strangers. Including if you use most crypto. So if having any financial privacy is more important to any of you than HODL memes, then you should support it.

Yes, I like stacking sats just as much as the rest of you, but I am also a fierce privacy advocate.

It is shocking how the sentiment in this community has changed from promoting privacy to shunning it since the new year.

@everyone who's saying such a thing would cause BTC to get banned everywhere: I don't think that is possible, now that ETFs are here.

No point in using Tor, VPN, private email, Graphene OS, Bitcoin, Tails if everyone can see your financial history. That is all that is needed to take you down.

Let the clock tick.

Privacy is a bad idea for Bitcoin, it is not needy and it will only make Bitcoin looks bad, all the nonsense that Elizabeth has been talking about makes no sense because Bitcoin is not a privacy coin, if Bitcoin was a privacy coin it will be very harder for it to progress, I believe that most countries including the US will see Bitcoin as a great threat to their country.

If the government can't trace movement of money or fund on your innovation, that makes it a threat to the centralized world, please leave Bitcoin be on its decentralised feature only, this is tolerable by every centralized entities and to say the truth some still don't sit well with Bitcoin, and if privacy is add it will ruin everything.

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We have seen what happened with mixers and privacy featured crypto wallets, that is a big lesson as to what could possibly happen if Bitcoin is a privacy-featured coin.

Aside from the technical issue, here's what happens:


If that were to happen, which is not going to happen, as things are now, the Bitcoin would only be used to buy stuff on the deep web and today it would not even be used to bet in casinos, since there are hardly any unlicensed casinos left, and with all the cryptocurrency alternatives there are, they would be forced not to accept bitcoin.


Something like that.

It won't solve anything for the same reason people are still using P2PKH/P2Sh addresses even though we added SegWit many years ago and it offers a lot of benefits.
An opt-in option is not going to help much with privacy specially in a world where centralized places are rejecting CoinJoin transactions (opt-in) they can reject the said opt-in privacy feature too hence forcing its adoption to remain low which means it won't solve anything.

I wonder exactly what he means by "the clock is ticking" maybe he is pointing at the inevitability of a CBDC becoming the ultimate medium of exchange in the future in every country? Something like that? I'm not sure what else he would be speaking to, but I would certainly agree that this needs to be implemented. Privacy is key, why else would USD say "this is legal tender for all debts public and private" If cash now is anonymous in physical form then BTC should also be anonymous at the digital level if it will ever be the primary "medium of exchange" or world reserve currency used by the entire globe.

Edward Snowden is right I mean bitcoin is not totally anonymous in my opinion now there is organization that can track about bitcoin transaction heck you can track people.

But organization like Arkham can do the job more detail. So no wonder that Edward Snowden worries about this

Personally, I don't like optional privacy in altcoins (like LTC or Zcash). Only 10% of ZEC's transactions use shielded addresses, which kinda defeats the purpose. I don't even understand why Snowden used to shill ZEC.

I prefer mandatory privacy (XMR, BEAM etc.)

When it comes to BTC, some people argue that transparency is needed to avoid (rare) bugs like this one.

Theoretically if this bug happened on XMR nobody would ever notice it (well, unless someone was dumb enough to dump so many coins in an exchange ).

the article is not indepth at all
70% of the article just tells you about bitcoin and litecoin.. then it just says MWEB offers privacy due to confidentiality, and thus uses confidentiality to give privacy
its just a bundles of words shuved together that doesnt go in depth at all

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so lets explain
you lock funds up and then those coins are grouped together and pegged where it only publishes the group total holdings and a hash.. the hash is for the group to work within as their proof of certain things only they know whereby outsiders cant see the raw data of your transaction because only the hash is published of the sum total.
you personally wont see your transaction on the litecoin network

but when you want to exit the group you then become individual again and now your funds are normal litecoin transactions on the litecoin network

the major downside is your funds are part of a group fund and then when in the group you are then only playing with pegged units that are not audited by the litecoin network

for instance
here is someone locking in ~4.25LTC into the group (of ~29k ltc) of the other network group stash
lock:
https://blockchair.com/litecoin/transaction/dd375cbbc377b7e6d1985a4a201b661ccc8db124811a9efaac6e63edbf646485
combining:
https://blockchair.com/litecoin/transaction/afdfb3e076b9a355fab8057e21585364efe4cee86fb69fcc8d9c0c0787b57ecd

its not making your payments private. its instead you giving away your coin to a group so you can then make silly private IOU pegged notes to each other in a separate network not seen by the litecoin network

the second major downside is you cant make real litecoin transactions to normal litecoin users. you are only making iou pegged notes to other MWEB users in the group

The reason could be the strong crackdown the US government has on privacy oriented softwares. Bitcoin developers seem cautious of new forks or changes in the network regarding privacy. Read through your shared link, and it's true of the privacy features on Litecoin network. The similarity it has with bitcoin's POW shows how simple it'll be to run similar updates on Bitcoin. But, Litecoin is not as mainstream as Bitcoin, despite its lesser fee features and faster integration of blocks, the government would be very strict on such changes if it came from Bitcoin developers.

A privacy oriented startup Zksnack has removed their coinjoin features from wallets that utilizes it, such as btcpay, because they want to obey the government. Since they want to keep track of all transactions happening in the Bitcoin network launching a privacy oriented upgrade on bitcoin may get an immediate attention of the government on Bitcoin. Snowden on the other hand, has been reminding Bitcoin developers of this for a long time. He commends projects like Zcash for their privacy features, so I think of him as someone who cherish privacy on cryptocurrency transactions. But, he's been ghosted all through these years by Bitcoin developers. Hence the government happens to be a reason why.

Again, the problem is as stated by @dkbit98, improved privacy means more transaction size and longer verification time so it's not viable to just put it in at a protocol level just because it's a good idea to do. There's Lightning Network which can improve your bitcoin privacy but that's not a good long-term solution. As much as I agree with you that privacy improvement is a top priority for bitcoin, it's not easy especially with such conflicting ideas from other developers, don't lose out of hope though because I'm sure that they'll find a way to do it but I hope that they do it soon.

If I am being honest, I am quite fine with the amount of privacy there is to bitcoin as of right now however I see that many people are not satisfied and thus they seek out services of other projects.

Now we are seeing that the government seems to be sniping down on privacy projects hence why Snowden must have been alarmed. Is it possible that the government is doing something again to take away the privacy we think we have?

Of course we should invest with Bitcoin privacy because many times it is better to invest by watching. Many times we discuss about Bitcoin privacy in public. If Bitcoin is not accepted in our country, then it is never right for us to discuss it in front, so if we consider it from that point of view, if we can invest while maintaining the privacy of Bitcoin, it is very positive from our side. Bitcoin is a digital currency so we must invest patiently while maintaining enough privacy in that investment, we will get success through investment.

Yawnnn! I see a lot of what the community should do, what developers should do, and how we need to achieve whatever but very little on how many users or investors outside this forum would really want this, would really need this and more importantly would take privacy over risks of huge profits blown away by such move!

Common, some really need to understand that there are Bitcoin lovers of different degrees, some like the maximalist here and some others who only DCA cause it will go up, the moment you present them with an option that they might not need but would mean the end of ETFs and as much of there trading on CEXs you would need to be daydreaming to think they will support it.


Make that 2011 as getting restrictions after being accepted will be one hundred times worse than when it was just a gray area.

Well yeah I think it should just be that way since we do have choices with Altcoins like Monero if we wanted a full privacy when it comes to our assets. Maybe devs just live it what it is before or maybe they are cooking something to enhance the privacy of Bitcoin who knows right? Is it because of emerging supercomputers with incredible computing power that might be threat to it, or just the privacy alone? I  just don't understand why he is concerned about Bitcoins privacy wherein privacy coins are available around for many years now. Please enlighten me here since I don't know much about technicalities.

I've been following up this case and I've come to understand that this wasn't the first time Edward Snowden has highlighted vulnerabilities in Bitcoin's privacy measures, over 10 years now he's been repeatedly warning Bitcoin developers that Bitcoin's protocol level has been flawed.

It's really shocking how they've chosen to pay no mind these several warnings over the years even after knowing the essentiality of privacy and anonymity in the Bitcoin community.
Perhaps his last warning now about the clock ticking would awaken their interests on this issue. Or not.

The community needs to understand that, putting privacy measures in place, just like conjoin, confidential transactions as well as other anonymity enhancement techs at Bitcoin's protocol level could be quite a viable option towards maintaining the privacy and security of the Bitcoin network.
The community needs to put some unanimous effort towards addressing this issue in order to make sure that bitcoin remains safe and privacy preserving asset for all of its users.
Let's just hope it doesn't require or take another ten years or decade before this issue is addressed just like Jameson had potentially said.

But they do care about their profitability (which is directly affected by BTC/USD and ETF inflows), don't they?

An informal one-world government already exists and people keep arguing about West vs Russia (controlled opposition).

Be careful what you wish for, because this might turn into a global technocracy/dictatorship (we got a small taste back in 2020-2021)...

Miners who secured the network in the early days cared about the core values of Bitcoin, current miners (big companies) care only about FIAT profit.
They don't care about ethos.


We wrongly belief that government is needed. I think there would be much less wars / less deaths that are usually fueled by profits,  if there was no government at all.

Yeah but I don't think anyone truly down with the bitcoin ethos (miners included) has ever really cared what those two entities have to say about... anything.

Eventually - if/when - we get invaded by aliens, a one-world government might not be such a bad idea. We'll really need to get our shit together. Until then we'll continue to argue with anyone who holds different beliefs than we do.

Bitcoin came to light too early, developers are now afraid of devaluation consequences and possible chain splitting.
It would be much easier for the developers to take action if not the high marketcap.

They have bet a lot on LN development and unfortunately it failed at what it promised and it's becoming more centralized everyday.
We now know that privacy must be on L1 and scalability issues of L1 will hinder L2 capabilities.

Trying to build something on current Bitcoin base layer is like building an upside-down pyramid - it won't stand.