Edward Snowden has shifted his focus to zero-knowledge proofs as the path forward for private cryptocurrency transactions. The former CIA employee and renowned whistleblower backs Zcash's cryptographi
Edward Snowden has shifted his focus to zero-knowledge proofs as the path forward for private cryptocurrency transactions. The former CIA employee and renowned whistleblower backs Zcash's cryptographic system, citing Vitalik Buterin alongside his own conviction. Buterin, Ethereum's co-founder, put it this way: "Zcash's privacy tech makes it the most interesting Bitcoin alternative. Bitcoin is great, but 'if it's not private, it's not safe.'"
Snowden pinned his confidence on ZK-SNARKs, Zcash's specific implementation of zero-knowledge proof technology. The system masks the transaction value, recipient identity, and sender information, creating a privacy layer that Bitcoin cannot offer. "Personally, I think zk-SNARKs are a hugely important, absolutely game-changing technology. They are the single most under-hyped thing in cryptography right now," Buterin said.
John McAfee weighed in this week with a similar assessment. He named Monero, Zcash, and Dash as privacy coins that could gain significant value if governments move to tax cryptocurrency trading. The threat rings true in South Korea, where investors now grapple with newly proposed capital gains taxes on their holdings.
The tax prospect makes privacy more pressing. Bitcoin's public ledger allows blockchain explorers to trace every transaction. Exchanges enforce strict Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering compliance, as Coinbase discovered when working with the IRS. These mechanisms link transactions and wallet addresses to actual people. ZK-SNARKs break this connection.
Zcash hit the market in October 2016 and faced skepticism over its "trusted set-up," a launch mechanism that critics cast as centralized. Zooko Wilcox, the project's founder, and his team have fielded these questions many times. The coin traded at $195 three months ago. By this week, it topped $719.
Snowden addressed the trusted set-up concern. The ceremony involved multiple recognized figures, including Bitcoin Core developer Peter Todd. Attackers would need to compromise every single participant to undermine the setup. Snowden saw this margin of safety as nearly certain. "Due to the design of the ceremony, the chance of every single participant (many known, respected, publicly identified figures) in the ceremony being compromised (which is the only way to cause harm) is close to zero. An undetected flaw in the novel cryptography is more realistic," he said. "The only way I can see the initial ceremony having been compromised is by a bad build distributed to all participants. But this is hard to pull off in the first place, and participants kept copies of the build on write-once media, providing for an audit trail."
Monero and Dash have outpaced Zcash in price rallies. Zcash's trajectory suggests the market has moved past the setup debate.
