BTC Privacy Feud Explodes After Snowden Talks New Taproot Upgrade

A BTC privacy feud explodes after Edward Snowden started talking on the long-awaited BTC Taproot upgrade, saying that the core developers haven’t prioritized privacy so let’s read more in our latest Bitcoin news today.

Core devs said that the Taproot software update for BTC will improve privacy but according to Snowden, it doesn’t fix the biggest privacy problem of the cryptocurrency. Edward Snowden was a former National Security Agency contractor that exposed a secret surveillance program of American citizens and as one of the foremost private advocates in the world, he thinks that BTC isn’t private enough and that the upcoming software update will likely make it worse.

Respect @Snowden for his work on privacy and criticism of CBDCs. But this clip is a disaster. TLDR:

-Taproot makes Bitcoin privacy worse
-Lightning is “shenanigans”
-Attacks core devs
-Hypes NFTs + privacy coins (except Monero which he trashes)

When SnowdenCoin? Say it ain’t so pic.twitter.com/xQtoGyCEHV

— Alex Gladstein (@gladstein) May 8, 2021

His comments created something of an uproar from fellow activists like Alex Gladstein who is the Chief Strategy Officer of the Human Rights Foundation who thinks that Snowden misrepresented the Taproot upgrade. Others argued that the Russian exile cannot see the importance of the mainstream adoption that could falter it turns too far towards anonymity. Snowden talked with Frontier Foundation’s Marta Belcher during the Ethereal Summit and said:

“Cryptocurrency, and by this I’m just going to say Bitcoin, is really failing comprehensively, terribly, on the privacy angle.”

Taproot was first proposed in 2018 and it was in the process of making ways from developers’ brains to the BTC protocol itself and when it comes online, it’s supposed to improve privacy as well as security and scalability. This is because it can take complex transactions on the BTC network and make them seem as they are single transactions. The transactions involving multi-signature wallets or the Lighting Network could look like other peer-to-peer transactions and this new upgrade if combined with Schnorr signatures, will further obscure the mechanics at play and adding privacy.

Some of us are protected by the Russians, others have to work the system from home more gradually. https://t.co/598CrldNB8

— Ryan Selkis (@twobitidiot) May 9, 2021

He went on to praise privacy coins like Monero and Zcash and urged BTC to be private-by-design before questioning the willingness of the people that help maintain the blockchain to embrace the paradigm which is how the btc privacy feud exploded:

“It’s really frustrating, I think, for a lot of people in this space that the core development team for Bitcoin has not prioritized this, because the longer they wait, the more obstacles are going to be put in place to prevent that from being the case.”

Source: https://www.dcforecasts.com/bitcoin-news/btc-privacy-feud-explodes-after-snowden-talks-new-taproot-upgrade/