284 sats \ 7 replies \ @petertodd 28 Jul \ on: Snowden Not "Our Tribe"? WTF? BooksAndArticles
“How do we secure the transactions on the Bitcoin Network moving forward? I have said this for 10 years [and] I have been ignored for 10 years.” - Snowden
I saw him say this live and it's nonsense. In the past years we developed and deployed Lightning, a L2 designed from the ground up to provide good privacy. Lightning didn't need to have onion routing. Yet we implemented that from day zero precisely because the privacy was obviously needed.
The fact is, the typical Bitcoin transaction "plebs" actually do to buy goods and services these days is via Lightning, and leaves no on-chain traces at all. And on top of that, we've enormously improved coinjoin implementations, and deployed taproot, whose keypath mechanism is specifically designed for privacy.
Snowden has been saying this stuff for years. It was a better argument in the past. But his argument has become out of date and he hasn't found something new to say.
Its not hard to imagine an AI model analyzing the base layer in real time and giving us some high probabilities that this UTXO belongs to this person. LN adoption still has a long way to go with the majority of us still using custodial services.
Maybe having these models come out might be the kick we need to get more of us running our own LN nodes or at least self custodial LN wallets.
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So what would be his motive in saying it now? Whose interests does it serve if the claims being advanced aren't true today?
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Hard to know. One motive can simply be wanting to continue getting speaking slots and (possibly) speaking fees. Given his position, the public forgetting about him is a genuine danger to his life.
It's also likely that the Russian government has something to do with it. Bitcoin is not good for Russia if used internally. So having Snowden FUD Bitcoin privacy aligns with their interests, and it's not like Snowden can easily say no if told to say something. I've heard rumors that Ukraine is using Bitcoin to pay informants and saboteurs in Russia with Bitcoin, and I'm inclined to believe that is happening.
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Yeah. If your tribe is "fear" then I guess what Snowden is saying makes sense as an identity.
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