Edward Snowden, a whistleblower who exposed the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance, revealed that he played a key role in the “trusted setup” ceremony of the privacy coin Zcash.
- In a recent video published by Zcash Media Snowden announces that he “participated in the Zcash original ceremony under the pseudonym John Dobbertin.”
- Snowden was 1 of 6 people who helped with the launch on October 23rd, 2016. The other 5 individuals were also working under pseudonyms, each member held access to a sliver of Zcash’s private key. Each of the members had to destroy their part of the key.
- The reason every individual was kept pseudonymous until after the ceremony was to make sure there weren’t any compromises in the entire key sequence. If someone had gotten access to the entire key, then they would be able to counterfeit as many Zcash tokens as they please.
- Zcash is inherently a privacy-based coin. It uses zero-knowledge proofs which allow transactions to be validated on its blockchain through cryptocurrency mining, without showcasing most aspects of the transaction like addresses and the amount being sent.
- In the video Snowden remarks that “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.”
- Software developer, Peter Todd was one of the first to come out and announce his role as one of the 6 pseudonymous individuals a part of the ceremony. He explained his story of the process in an article he published titled “Cypherpunk Desert Bus“
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