How Edward Snowden Helped Create Privacy Coin Zcash

Per a Forbes exclusive, activist Edward Snowden revealed his participation in a ceremony that led to the creation of the privacy coin Zcash. Developed by the Electric Coin Company (ECC), the privacy coin was deployed in 2016 in a secret ceremony with the aid of 6 individuals.

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The identity of 5 of the participants was made public except for one, until today. Edward Snowden was part of this ceremony using the pseudonym John Dobbertin, a reference to a German cryptographer.

These individuals performed different tasks, as Forbes pointed out, and possessed a piece of Zcash’s private creation key which was destroyed after the ceremony was completed. Conducted in several places across the world, this ceremony allowed the creation of the privacy coin’s genesis block.

In the past, Edward Snowden has expressed his support for cryptocurrencies, such as Zcash and Bitcoin. However, he believes Bitcoin was created with a flaw: its transparency. The activist and former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) consultant told Forbes:

A When we look at cryptocurrency we generally see the cryptographic properties of it 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. Bitcoin quite famously is an open ledger. The problem with that is you can’t have truly free trade unless you have private trade. And you can’t have a free society without free trade.

Snowden met Zooko Wilcox, co-founder of the ECC, via Marcia Hofmann, a veteran of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the report claims. After a virtual meeting, Wilcox and Edward Snowden decided to collaborate.

The co-founder of the ECC told Forbes:

Ed’s revelations were really validating for the kind of defenses, the kind of safe infrastructure that I had been trying to build for society, and other people had doubted,” says Wilcox. “His revelations showed people that I had been right all along.

How Much Did Edward Snowden Make For Supporting Zcash

Snowden pointed out some issues with Zcash’s privacy and introduced Wilcox to certain CIA tactics to conduct the ceremony. The privacy activity and former NSA consultant agreed to reveal his role in the event, per the clarification that he was never paid to support the cryptocurrency.

In a recent event, Edward Snowden reiterated his position on Bitcoin and even claimed that some developers are aware of it. However, he doubts that the first cryptocurrency by market cap will ever address them:

Privacy for bitcoin is still an open disaster. Everyone is aware of it, I’ve tweeted exchanges with the core developers, they know it. And there are improvement proposals out there. But it’s moving slowly. I have to think, at this point, there is basically a fear of moving forward to fix that, and that’s what’s making everybody a slow boat, because this is the core problem with bitcoin today. There is no issue more important than fixing the weaknesses of the open ledger.

Data shared by the report indicates that privacy coins have managed to reach over $11 billion in total market cap. Zcash could see a boost on this metric as it prepares to roll out its most important update to date. Called “Halo”, it is expected to increase the cryptocurrency’s privacy capabilities.

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As of press time, ZEC’s price trades at $148 with a 1% profit on the 4-hour chart.