{"id":353227,"date":"2024-07-27T10:04:28","date_gmt":"2024-07-27T04:34:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/?p=353227"},"modified":"2024-07-27T10:04:28","modified_gmt":"2024-07-27T04:34:28","slug":"edward-snowden-tells-bitcoin-fans-to-vote-but-dont-join-a-cult-crypto-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/edward-snowden-tells-bitcoin-fans-to-vote-but-dont-join-a-cult-crypto-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Edward Snowden Tells Bitcoin Fans to Vote\u2014But \u2018Don\u2019t Join a Cult\u2019 – Crypto News"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency (NSA) employee turned whistleblower, warned Bitcoiners Friday that their support of crypto-friendly politicians should be tempered.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cCast your vote but don\u2019t join a cult,\u201d he said, while speaking virtually to thousands of attendees gathered around a main stage at this year\u2019s annual Bitcoin conference in Nashville.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the beginning of his talk, Snowden said that he didn\u2019t want to make his talk about politics. But his plea was later reprised as closing remarks. Toward the middle, he spoke cautiously about the prospect of political change stemming from elections, comparing it to redressed authority.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAs far as the average worker is concerned, whether we’re talking about this election or any other in the last 20 years, a given election tends to result in what feels like a different uniform on the same cop,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd that’s a problem.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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The backdrop for this year\u2019s Bitcoin conference has been tinged with shades of red<\/a>, with former President Donald Trump slated to be its biggest speaker Saturday. Meanwhile, Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) and the former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy spoke on Friday, too.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the same time, Snowden\u2019s speech was sandwiched between two other political chats. Before Snowden spoke, Sen. Cynthia Lummis had an emphatic chat with Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) about Bitcoin. The presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an independent, came after.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe have to work together, and we have to make sure they do not reduce this country to the land of the fee and the home of the slave,\u201d Snowden said. \u201cThe only way we will do that is if we work together.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Snowden has been a prominent privacy advocate for years, warning against the sanctioning of crypto-based privacy tools like Tornado Cash. He\u2019s also been a vocal skeptic of central bank digital currencies, warning that they could serve as government-backed surveillance tools.<\/span><\/p>\n

One key element of Snowden\u2019s speech was the notion that governments will mine people\u2019s metadata using artificial intelligence (AI) tools. It\u2019s turning what was once an analyst\u2019s task into heaping servings of data that can be analyzed instantaneously by complex machines.<\/span><\/p>\n

Regardless of who wins at the ballot box in November, Snowden said the trend is unlikely to change. According to him, it\u2019s a fantasy to assume that AI isn\u2019t being leveraged to create profiles of people\u2019s personal spending habits already.<\/span><\/p>\n

As governments leverage AI technology to surveillance financial transactions, he added that Bitcoin\u2019s public ledger is a prime location for models to train.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe’re running out of time to fix this, and the consequences of ignoring it are a whole lot worse,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is not Terminator, right? This is not Skynet. This is not robots in the sky to drag you out of your home. That might come someday, but that’s a long way off.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Edited by Ryan Ozawa<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n

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Daily Debrief Newsletter<\/h3>\n

Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency (NSA) employee turned whistleblower, warned Bitcoiners Friday that their support of crypto-friendly politicians should be tempered. \u201cCast your vote but don\u2019t join a cult,\u201d he said, while speaking virtually to thousands of attendees gathered around a main stage at this year\u2019s annual Bitcoin conference in Nashville. At the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":353231,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[230,225,221,227,226,228,229,60,223,224,222],"class_list":["post-353227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cryptocurrency","tag-brave","tag-coinbase","tag-crypto","tag-decentralised","tag-decentralized","tag-decentralized-exchange","tag-erc-20","tag-featured","tag-meme-coin","tag-robinhood","tag-solana"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353227"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":353234,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353227\/revisions\/353234"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/353231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}