In case people don't open the link or miss the disclosure:<p>Disclosure: CoinDesk is a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which has an ownership stake in Zcash Company, the for-profit entity supporting zcash's development.
Labeling Monero as "amateur crypto" detracts from his credibility a lot. The crypto Monero uses is older and more tested than the new crypto in Zcash and the development in Monero seems very professional. It's not perfect of course but it's far from amateurish.
I heard about these guys on NPR's Radiolab podcast a couple months ago, and the whole thing gave me a creepy feeling.<p><a href="http://www.radiolab.org/story/ceremony/" rel="nofollow">http://www.radiolab.org/story/ceremony/</a><p>They describe the whole ceremony the guys go through to generate the random secret key that seeds their algorithm and needs to be kept secret in order to prevent anybody from counterfeiting coins. It was an elaborate setup supposedly designed to prevent people from observing any details they might be able to use to reverse engineer the algorithm. But, despite all their insistance on bespoke cloak and dagger shit, there were a lot of times the process could have been broken:<p>- They're supposed to be driving to a randomly selected electronics store to buy the laptop that will generate the number; but the guy makes an "unscheduled" stop at a costume store so he can buy a wizard hat (and potentially hand off information with a third party who wants to know their destination, or to pick up some kind of surveillance device)<p>- When the time comes to type random numbers on the laptop keyboard, the guy covers his hands and the keyboard. Arguable pro there is that nobody can see which keys he touches, but the big obvious con is that he can slip that USB device he picked up at the costume shop into one of the USB ports.<p>- People are using their phones while this whole process is going on? Ok, seems counterproductive to all that paranoid security they were trying to have...<p>- Oh look, they noticed strange indicators that strongly suggested somebody's phone got hacked and was being used to spy on their skype conversation? Somebody that paranoid should have immediately shut the process down and restarted it at a later date. They didn't do that? Something sure is fishy with the guy running this thing.<p>tl;dr; I don't trust 'em
Its curious to see, I travel around a bit and I'm always astounded how many countries still use cash and have backwards banking infrastructure.<p>You'd think transferring money from one account to another should be near instantaneous and require no third party. If bitcoins can shake the rest of the world into the modern age I'm all for it.
Why does anyone care what Snowden thinks about crypto currency? He was a SharePoint administrator. I don't understand why his opinion is relevant.<p>Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for his sacrifice, and I think he deserves to be pardoned.
Love the assertion of critical thinking taking place. Nets out to be petty banter.<p>I think at any given time Snowden doesn't have a lot of liquid assets to do a Jamie Dimon and swing the markets on a trade. Hence I think his intentions are sound coupled with his known scruples.<p>Monero was found traceable recently. Period. Fixed or not doesn't matter, to him it's a risk for a) being tracable b) having bugs.<p>Lastly, it's a tweet from one person getting wrapped around the axel overthinking it. Next.
If all you have is a cryptocurrency, then I don't think you have anything that interesting. They've proven useful for buying drugs, but beyond that they've not created many new business opportunities. I don't have an exhaustive knowledge of cryptos, but Ethereum is extensible which is interesting. GNU came out with a crypto that they say is unsuited for illegal activities. Being even more secure than Bitcoin just makes you more appealing to an even smaller set of Bitcoin users.