Renowned whistleblower Edward Snowden commented on Sunday night that the price of bitcoin has been resilient over the past year and a half despite global campaigns by governments to undermine the network.
“Sometimes I think about it and wonder how many people bought Bitcoin at the time,” Snowden wrote on Sunday, citing his March 2020 tweet. At that time, the price of bitcoin was between 5 and 6 thousand dollars.
“This is the first time in a while that I have felt the urge to buy bitcoin. This drop was a huge panic and very little reason,” Snowden wrote in March of 2020.
While Snowden has expressed concerns about the Bitcoin alias in the past, it is remarkable that he continues to track its price in US dollars and write about it to an audience of nearly 5 million users on Twitter.
“The number has increased 10-fold since then, despite a coordinated global campaign by governments to undermine public understanding of — and support for — cryptocurrency,” Snowden said on Twitter on Sunday.
“China banned it, but it only made bitcoin stronger,” he continued. Snowden here refers to the global redistribution of bitcoin’s hashing power that followed China’s mining ban and subsequent user ban. It is worth noting that all these government restrictions on Bitcoin do little to stop the network, but rather further decentralize it.
Snowden’s recent tweets about Bitcoin track events in El Salvador. Yesterday just before the tweet, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele noted that the country has outsourced more than 3 million Bitcoin users in just 26 days.
Notably, on September 7, Snowden tweeted: “Today Bitcoin is officially recognized as legal tender in its first country.”
“Away from the headlines, there is now pressure on competing nations to acquire Bitcoin – even if only as a reserve asset – as its design greatly stimulates early adoption.”
Snowden’s recent tweets show his interest in the geopolitical implications and game theory of Bitcoin adoption. After El Salvador submitted a legal tender for bitcoin, Snowden asserted that bitcoin favored early adopters, thus putting pressure on other countries, which would be punished for being backward.