Edward Snowden reveals he was one of six who helped launch Zcash

cointelegraph.com:

Cybersecurity poster boy and government surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden has revealed he played a pivotal role in the creation of privacy token Zcash (ZEC).

A video from Zcash Media featured an interview with Snowden where he outlined his involvement as one of the six individuals who had a piece of the Zcash multisig private key to launch the project on Oct. 23, 2016. In the video, Snowden stated:

Edward Snowden is the whistleblower who revealed U.S. government surveillance tactics and went into hiding in 2013.

Zcash is a decentralized blockchain that uses zero-knowledge proofs in its transactions. ZEC transactions cannot be tracked and the amounts transmitted cannot be determined, unlike with relatively transparent Bitcoin (BTC).

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The Zcash Ceremony saw Snowden and five other people each combine their portion of the Zcash private key to launch the project. None of the participants knew who the others were nor what portion of the key they held so as to protect their anonymity, one of the tenets of the project.

Each person’s key portion needed to be destroyed in order to prevent coins or transactions from being counterfeited in the future.

In the interview with Zcash Media, Snowden shared his enthusiasm for the project and his zeal for privacy. He said “The problem with [Bitcoin] is you can’t have truly free trade unless you have private trade.”

Another participant in the ceremony, Bitcoin developer Peter Todd recalled the