Whatever Happened to Ed Snowden’s Treasure Chest of Bitcoins?

In an interview conducted in Moscow, whistleblower Edward Snowden said he had enough Bitcoin to spend in a lifetime. At the interview, the price of Bitcoin had surpassed $1000. With the recent volatility in Bitcoin and the persistent bear market, it remains unclear how much Bitcoin Snowden still has.

Edward Snowden’s BTC holdings

In October this year, as the price of Bitcoin hovered around $20K, Decrypt, a crypto publication, interviewed Snowden, asking him if he was still Bitcoin rich amid reports that he was working for an IT company based in Russia. Snowden was one of the early investors in Bitcoin.

In response to the question, Snowden said that people should not trust everything in the media, adding that his remarks on bitcoin were a private matter that should not have been published.

“If anybody asks you what crypto you have, what you hold, the answer is: ‘What is crypto?’ But I’m not at risk of going hungry, certainly not this year. Let’s put it that way,” Snowden added.

Snowden is a popular whistleblower who became popular between 2012 and 2013. According to the US government, Snowden stole 1.5 million classified documents from the United States. At the time, Snowden was working as a contractor for the NSA in Hawaii. Snowden later shared 200,000 of these documents with journalists and fled to Russia.

Disclosures from these documents revealed different mechanisms of the American surveillance system after 9/11. The government conducted domestic dragnet programs and international espionage campaigns. However, the contents of the remaining documents remain unclear.

Snowden requested asylum in Russia on August 1, 2013. His asylum request was accepted, and he has settled in the country. Kremlin lawyer Anatoly Kucherena has previously said that Kucherena holds an IT job in Russia.

Snowden continues to advocate for Bitcoin

The cryptocurrency sector has become a preferable industry by whistleblowers because it offers privacy. Snowden has been championing privacy and has continued to advocate for the use of Bitcoin.

Snowden is not the only whistleblower that has turned towards crypto in an attempt to protect their privacy. The Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen, also said that she was optimistic about her foreseeable future because of her investment in cryptocurrencies. she revealed that she holds crypto to support herself financially. After leaking Facebook documents to the press, she moved to Puerto Rico.

Following the recent collapse of the FTX exchange, Snowden has been vocal and said that after Sam Bankman-Fried mismanaged the exchange and caused losses to millions of customers, he was yet to be arrested. Customers on the exchange were yet to receive their funds.

The FTX exchange collapsed earlier this month before a bankruptcy filing was made on November 11. The collapse has resulted in calls for using self-custody wallets that are not usually under the control of centralized entities, as users can freely withdraw their funds from these wallets.

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• Trump’s Final Presidential Pardon List Excludes Snowden and Assange