“The first browser created is not the best browser" Edward Snowden Interview with Peter Van Valkenburgh about Bitcoin at Blockstack Berlin 2018. - Zcash, Monero better.
“I don’t think bitcoin will last forever […],” Mr. Snowden teased. “The first browser created is not the best browser that we have ever seen. Bitcoin does important work, and I do think it will have enduring value for a long time. But particularly when we look at the core development team and their rate of improvement to the protocol, they simply need to do better or they will not be able to compete.”
Right at the 43:00 minute mark, famed crypto legal expert Peter Van Valkenburgh of Coin Center turned the hour long interview to bitcoin. His piped-in guest from Russia was none other than Edward Snowden, erstwhile leaker of massive caches of National Security Agency documents. “Do you have any cryptocurrencies? Do you have any digital money?” Mr. Van Valkenburgh asked of Mr. Snowden. “Are you excited about cryptocurrencies?”
“Everybody is focused on the transaction rate limitations of bitcoin being its central flaw, and that is a major one, but I would argue actually the much larger structural flaw, the long lasting flaw, is its public ledger. That is simply incompatible with having a enduring mechanism for trade. You cannot have a lifelong history of everyone’s purchases, all of their interactions, be available to everyone and have that workout well at scale. The limitations of how people engage with these cryptocurrencies are the limiting factor on the apocalypses we’ve had from it so far, a natural relief of pressure on it.”