Despite a “coordinated global campaign by governments to undermine… cryptocurrency,” the NSA whistleblower and fugitive pointed out that BTC is up 10x in 18 months.
Bitcoin has been subject to a “coordinated global campaign by governments” to undermine public understanding of cryptocurrencies, Edward Snowden has claimed.
The former NSA and CIA contractor is known for releasing a huge trove of classified files about government programs aimed at wide surveillance of citizens. He’s also a strong proponent of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general.
The October 3 tweet highlighted the resiliency of Bitcoin in particular — noting that, in the past 18 months, its value has risen 10x. He added:
“China even banned it, but it just made Bitcoin stronger.”
Snowden was looking back at a March 13, 2020 tweet in which he said:
“This is the first time in a while I've felt like buying Bitcoin. That drop was too much panic and too little reason.”
On that day, Bitcoin had dropped nearly $5,000 in a week, hitting $4,106 at one point.
His initial thought was:
“Sometimes I think back to this and wonder how many people bought #Bitcoin then.”
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Conspiracies of Power
Take that in the context of another Twitter thread that Snowden began today — attacking Facebook’s contribution to the spread of false conspiracy theories.
In that discussion, he referenced a June blog post he wrote on the way conspiracies by governments and political parties are carried out brazenly and openly.
Its first line, he noted, was: “The greatest conspiracies are open and notorious — not theories, but practices expressed through law and policy, technology, and finance.”
“More often than not,” he added, these conspiracies are “announced in public and with a modicum of pride. They’re dutifully reported in our newspapers; they’re bannered onto the covers of our magazines; updates on their progress are scrolled across our screens — all with such regularity as to render us unable to relate the banality of their methods to the rapacity of their ambitions.”
This comes just days after Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler hired a general counsel who is a strong proponent of regulating decentralized finance (DeFi) stringently.
It’s notable that as a commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, not only has Dan Berkovitz said unlicensed DeFi markets are probably illegal, he has said that their core purpose — cutting out financial intermediaries — is dangerous as they actually protect investors, prevent fraud and detect money laundering.
As a CFTC Commissioner, Berkovitz said:
“We should not permit DeFi to become an unregulated shadow financial market in direct competition with regulated markets.”
