Snowden Bitcoin 2024 Speech: Privacy Challenges of Bitcoin in the AI Era

Source: Edward Snowden Keynote Speech Bitcoin 2024

Compiled by: Golden Finance

Hello everyone, it's great to be with you all. You are an amazing group of people.

First of all, I’m glad to be with you. Not long ago, I spoke at a Bitcoin conference in Amsterdam, and the topics we discussed were very different. It’s surprising that in just nine months, we have seen such a significant change. Last time, the topic was how the game was so corrupt and unfair, but we couldn't leave. We endured these injustices because we had no other choice.

The surprising thing is that we are starting to create our own choices. Nine months ago, the core topic was Gary Gensler, Gary Gensler, Gary Gensler. Everyone was focused on what he said, and I had to remind everyone that Gary Gensler is not Daddy Bitcoin. It’s easier to explain this now because it turns out that Bitcoin is Daddy Gensler. Ladies and gentlemen, we are achieving victories, but we have not won yet, so we must ensure we do not get cocky.

Unfortunately, this is also the end of the pleasant part of this speech, but I think many people will talk about happy things this year, so you don’t need me to say those. I noticed that this year we have more political representatives, which is a beautiful and significant thing. We have reached a stage where initially they ignored us, then they fought us, but now they are trying to make us love them.

I want to briefly touch on this because I don’t want the entire speech to be about politics; voting is necessary, but don’t join a faction. They are not our representatives, not your personality. They have their own interests, values, and pursuits. Try to get what you need from them, but don’t give yourself to them, even if you must vote for them.

Instead, I want to take a different angle for this talk. I hope you reflect on where we are, how we got here, and where we are going.

There is a quote in a book that I think resonates very well with this group. "I believe that in every country in the world, the greed and injustice of princes and sovereign states, abusing the trust of their subjects, have gradually diminished the actual quantity of metal originally contained in their coins." From Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, written in 1776.

We are no longer playing a game of metal, but if you look around, you will see this issue appearing everywhere, affecting us, binding us. You can see it in the internet as well.

What’s wrong with the internet? The problem is not with the internet, but with the world, as they are increasingly becoming one. A system has been built, not only through administrative management but also through the concentration of resources and the intermediation of generations, and this system is fundamentally unfair.

I mean, look at the economy. Resources are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. Even the voice of humanity is like this. The winner-takes-all model is evident, whether you are talking about broadcast media, traditional media, newspapers, or social media. A minority of opinions increasingly rely on the tolerance of censors, barely surviving on the margins of platforms.

You see Canadian truck drivers having their bank accounts canceled, you see Colombian students being fired for expressing opinions. We don’t necessarily have to agree with their views, but they should have the right to argue, persuade, dissent, and protest. This is the driving force of our progress, the existence of differing opinions. If we accept that the system we inherited is the best, that it should not change or be challenged, then we are saying that this moment in history is the best, and that is not true. We know it is not.

Despite enjoying many privileges and the benefits brought by technology, life is still hard. But all the good things you enjoy are the results of someone’s labor, effort, and ingenuity, the time they dedicated in their lives to us, to the human community. The system we have built around us is designed to extract as much of these results as possible and return it to those in power.

The issues I mentioned are not technical issues. They are very broad and relevant to the average audience, but tonight I want to remind you that I am concerned that this situation is about to change. Our lives are increasingly mediated by screens, glass panels. You are watching this speech, either live or registered through a smartphone or laptop. No one goes to the counter to buy tickets anymore; that’s not how the modern world operates.

But to set up a computer, turn it on, log in, set up an account, take out a smartphone, charge it, turn it on, connect to a Wi-Fi hotspot, you have to click "agree to continue." You must agree to someone else's terms of service. You are forced to pass through someone else's gate of permission, which is owned and controlled by others, who are not accountable to anyone. Look at Facebook, look at Google, and you will see how they abuse the trust of every person in every country. The EU is trying to control them, but they are completely bypassed.

There is a General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that was supposed to address all these issues, but it hasn’t worked. They say, "If you violate the rules, we will fine you 4% of global revenue." But the systematization of these technologies has not happened; it has been many years. Whether we are talking about companies or governments, we are talking about the same thing: systematized technology designed to manage our lives for the benefit of those institutions trying to organize us.

In some cases, we need this management. We need to be able to cooperate, to work together, we need to be able to work together, right? But we need to agree on this to some extent, we should need to agree on this. It’s not "click agree to continue or refuse and use my phone my way," but "click agree to continue or you cannot use your iPhone, cannot use your Android phone." Whether it’s made by Samsung, Google, or Apple, you either play by their rules or you can’t play at all. This needs to change.

Later we will talk about how we have made great progress in the context of money, this is why suddenly we see politicians taking a keen interest in these audiences. They understand that a new center of power is rising. But for all of us, including all the celebrities who will speak here, there remains a vulnerability, and that is AI.

I am not the kind of person who shouts online "AI is dangerous, AI is dangerous, robots are going to kill us, you need to worry about this." In fact, I hope they throw all these models onto the internet for all of us to use. OpenAI is not open; it is a very closed model company that hopes to profit at the expense of your interests. They want to train on your data but hope to benefit themselves; they do not want you to access these models. They do not want you to download models, extract models, get models you can run at home, put on your phone, and use freely. They want you to have to go back to their well, pay fees, and access everything only through their means, even if you do have the capability to run these models on hardware at home.

The good news is that putting these things into the hands of the public and running them at home is becoming easier and easier. I’m not just talking; I have been using these models at home for the past year. You can do it too. Whether we are talking about diffusion models for generating images, like the web interface you think of like Midjourney, you can do this at home completely for free as long as you have the hardware to run it. Whether we are talking about large language models. Facebook, the company I have been criticizing since the beginning of this speech, has actually done some beneficial things in this area. Not because they love you, or they love us, or they love me, or anyone else, but because they are afraid that their competitors, like OpenAI, will build a structure to prevent monopolies from forming and evade taxes. Facebook does not want to find itself in that position, so they say, "Well, we will develop tools and give them to everyone else so that monopolies do not form and will not be used against us." This is more out of self-interest than altruism, but I still appreciate it. I am not a fan of Mark Zuckerberg, but he has done great things in this regard. I hope he continues. I know this won’t last forever, but in the current situation, I welcome any help we can get.

But why am I talking about this at a Bitcoin conference? The reason is that Bitcoin transactions are not private. Everyone in this room knows this because it is now 2024, not 2013, when we said, "Oh, Bitcoin is completely anonymous, it’s the money of criminals." Today, Bitcoin is the only thing that is not the money of criminals. It is a secure hard currency that happens to be very useful. That’s why all investors are investing in it, all developers are developing it, and everyone is a fan of it, promoting it and participating in this event.

But if we accept that our transactions are not private, that they are forever public, we will increasingly see what is happening in AI and all this data collection and data brokering and analysis. Our lives are being observed. We are being studied more deeply than at any time in human history, and the tools used to derive conclusions, inferences, and patterns are more powerful than anything ever invented.

What keeps me awake at night in the context of AI is that they see the growing demand, interest, and appeal of Bitcoin. They are developing tools, systems, and methods to start cracking down on it. Saying "we have observed long enough," like "lions lurking beside antelopes away from the herd," but we are not just talking about individual cryptocurrency users; we are talking about the entire system.

How does this happen? What will they do? What will they do? The sad truth is they won’t tell us. If we look at the NSA, we look at the CIA, we look at the Department of Justice, we look at the Drug Enforcement Administration, we look at the Treasury Department, we look at all these agencies; they say they have missions, they say what they are going to do, they say what they cannot do, what they are not allowed to do, but we see what they actually do. We know about mass surveillance because I exposed it. We know about the mass collection of everyone’s data. We know they are trying to fight against all the crypto companies and tech companies that oppose them.

So in this context, what I think of, and hope you take back to your companies and reflect on, is all the wonderful things you are doing, all the things you bring to the table, all the things that excite users, all the users signing up for your services, using your applications, all the transactions made in the name of freedom and free commerce, they have more resources than all of us combined. But we have the advantage of technology, we have the benefits of distributed computing, we have the benefits of distributed ledgers, and we must think about how to make it stronger. Simply winning the hearts of the public is not enough. We need to make it hard for them to stop us. We need to make it hard for them to simply pull phone records and see who attended this conference, start paying attention to what they are developing, what they are doing, who they are communicating with, what they are trading.

That’s why there is so much debate about privacy in the community, and I understand. It’s hard because people say, "Oh, privacy is hard." That’s true, but we must go further. We must further strengthen the system. We need to do this together. No single company can find a solution that works. You can’t just add zero-knowledge proofs and call it a day. You can’t just add a mixing network and call it a day. You need to combine multiple strategies. That’s the direction I see for the future, ensuring our systems work so tightly together without a bottleneck.

This really is about user empowerment. Bitcoin is already a better system than the old systems, a better system than fiat currency, but to ensure it lasts, to ensure it is still there when we need it most, that they cannot take it away from us, we need to make sure it is hard to crack. We do this by combining the many great ideas of the many great people in this room.

So I know I’ve said a lot, and I know this may be a bit frustrating, but let me end on a positive note. Most importantly, it’s you. You are the ones building these things here. You are the ones advocating for these things here. You are the ones making these things happen.

It is my honor to be in this fight with you, thank you for your time.