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Edward Snowden, the well-known whistleblower and former computer intelligence consultant who exposed the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance, has revealed he took part in the Zcash creation ceremony. Snowden says that during the creation ceremony he “participated” and leveraged the “pseudonym John Dobbertin.”
A recent video published by Zcash Media explains that Edward Snowden was one of the six people who helped launch Zcash on October 23, 2016. According to the video, the six individuals did not know who the other participants were holding the Zcash private keys and they utilized pseudonyms to avoid identification.
Before the video was published it was known for years that the software developer Peter Todd participated in the ceremony as well. Todd actually wrote a comprehensive summary of the Zcash ceremony called the “Cypherpunk Desert Bus,” which explains what happened from his perspective.
However, Todd wrote an update on his blog post and struck through the text in the post below the update. “Taking this down for now until some questions about the deterministic builds are answered; currently I do not believe the Zcash trusted setup should be called a multi-party computation, making my involvement pointless,” Todd wrote.
In the video published by Zcash Media, Snowden is shown explaining that he too participated in the ceremony. “My name is Edward Snowden,” the famous American whistleblower says. “I participated in the Zcash original ceremony under the pseudonym John Dobbertin.” Snowden also discussed the issues with Bitcoin’s privacy in the video and stressed that a free currency is also private as well. Snowden remarked:
The problem with [bitcoin] is you can’t have truly free trade unless you have private trade. I’m just really happy to see that the Zcash project is moving us closer and closer towards that ideal of a free currency which is also a private currency
After the video published, Todd responded to the fact that Snowden was involved. “So turns out Snowden was one of the six participants in the Zcash trusted setup that I also participated in,” Todd tweeted. “Which I criticized heavily for being busted, followed by Zcash people falsely accusing me of sexual assault in retaliation.”
Others criticized Snowden for shilling Zcash while knowing he was an original creator. “Wow. I remember Snowden shilling zcash over bitcoin years ago. Really puts this in context,” the individual wrote.
What do you think about Edward Snowden being one of the original six key holders in the Zcash ceremony?
