NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has said that he believes Bitcoin will be overcome by another cryptocurrency that is more privacy focused without the need for a public ledger.

Snowden made these statements earlier this month at Blockstack Event in Berlin. He believes the main drawback of BTC is not its ability to scale – as many critics propose – but more importantly is its lack of privacy.

“Everybody is focused on the transaction rate limitations of bitcoin being its central flaw, and that is a major one, but I would argue that the much larger structural flaw, the long-lasting flaw, is its public ledger,” he said via webcam. “That is simply incompatible with having an enduring mechanism for trade, because you cannot have a lifelong history of everyone’s purchases, all of their interactions be available to everyone and have that work out well at scale.”

Snowden added “I don’t think Bitcoin will last forever”, he also hinted that he had used BTC in 2013 to conceal his identity while he was preparing to release classified NSA documents relating to privacy abuses – some of those stating that the NSA was actively spying on Bitcoin users.

“Bitcoin does important work and I do think it will have enduring value for a long time, but particularly when we look at the core development team and their rate of improvement to the protocol, they simply need to better or they will not be able to compete,” he continued.

Snowden has showed that he is most interested in privacy focused cryptocurrencies like Zcash. Currencies like Zcash anonymize the blockchain data to allow the users to verify transactions while keeping that data private from snoopers like the NSA and other governmental agencies.

“When we talk about which cryptocurrencies are interesting to me, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Zcash for me is the most interesting right now, because the privacy properties of it are truly unique, but we see more and more projects that are trying to emulate this and I think this is a positive thing.”

Watch the full talk with Edward Snowden below



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