Snowden says bitcoin is the first 'free' money, but he is bearish on the crypto in the long run

In an interview published by American Civil Liberties Union, Edward Snowden explains blockchain to his lawyer. One of the inevitable topics of conversation is Bitcoin about which Snowden says that it has very limited fundamental value but very real scarcity. He doesn’t consider Bitcoin private money but the first “free” money because the transactions can’t really be stopped or reversed, without the explicit, voluntary participation by the people involved. Snowden says that the hard truth about cryptocurrencies is that the only thing that gives them value is “the belief of a large population in their usefulness as a means of exchange”.

Snowden is bearish in the long term viability of Bitcoin as he says that “one day [it] will be gone, but as long as there are people out there who want to be able to move money without banks, cryptocurrencies are likely to be valued.” He points out that while Visa and MasterCard can process tens of thousands of transactions a second, Bitcoin can only handle about seven. Snowden also says that the flaw in Proof of Work is that it didn’t account for Bitcoin becoming too successful because it is now “economically reasonable for people to divert enormous amounts of energy” into mining. (Source: ACLU)