Edward Snowden Calls Bitcoin 'Most Significant Monetary Advance Since the Creation of Coinage'

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20 Feb 2024

Edward Snowden, a privacy advocate and former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor and whistleblower, says bitcoin “is the most significant monetary advance since the creation of coinage.” He views his statement as “unpopular but true.”

Edward Snowden’s ‘Unpopular but True’ Bitcoin Statement

Edward Snowden, a privacy advocate, posted about bitcoin on social media platform X Sunday. Snowden was a computer intelligence consultant and whistleblower who leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013. He described on X:

Unpopular but true: Bitcoin is the most significant monetary advance since the creation of coinage.

His post drew many responses, with many agreeing with him. Dave Benner, for example, opined: “Bitcoin exemplifies the separation of money and state, and that’s what the world needs more than anything right now.” Bitcoin advocate Robert Breedlove replied to Snowden: “Prior to coinage, every time money changed hands the weight and quality of the monetary metals transacted had to be verified. Coinage standardized money in a way that accelerated free trade and, thus, increased productivity. However, the standardization of coins required users to trust coin issuers not to misrepresent the weight or quality of the coins. Bitcoin is the world’s only standardized coin that does not require users to trust a coin issuer.”

A few people on X disagreed with the former NSA contractor. Jeff Hosterman, for example, asserted: “Definitely not true. It’s not even money. It’s only a means to transfer money. Fully traceable and no privacy. It does pretty much nothing that it was sold as.”
Snowden frequently shared his thoughts about bitcoin on X. On Feb. 11, he shared: “Everybody watching the Super Bowl and here I am watching the bitcoin chart.” Responding to a news headline in 2023 about Lebanon devaluing its currency by 90%, Snowden wrote: “*whispers* bitcoin fixes this.”

He also commented on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approving spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) early last month. “Bitcoin ETFs were (finally) just approved for trading tomorrow, after ten years. Maybe the politics in Congress around cryptocurrency will get better once they realize it’s backstopping pension funds and retirement accounts,” Snowden detailed. “Bitcoin ETFs begin trading today,” he posted on X the next day.
On Jan. 17, Snowden shared on X: “Wild how the SEC approving a bitcoin ETF was all it took to transform the CEO of JPMorgan from the King of Money into that guy who spends one half of every interview insisting ‘I don’t care about bitcoin,’ and the other half sobbing that it stole his wife and shot his dog.”
He previously clarified: “There is also a strain that thinks I recently discovered Bitcoin, simply because I criticize it at times. You know that whole NSA story from almost TEN YEARS AGO? I paid for the servers that made that possible… using bitcoin. I’m just not a maximalist.” In 2022, Snowden explained: