After Bitcoin’s (BTC) flash crash that saw its price drop to a new yearly low of $3,782, the notoriously famous whistleblower, Edward Snowden, expressed his desire to buy the currency.
In a tweet sent out on March 13, Snowden — who earned widespread ‘fame’ for revealing top-secret US documents blowing the whistle on American and British global surveillance operations — wrote:
“This is the first time in a while I’ve felt like buying bitcoin. That drop was too much panic and too little reason.”
The comments were made after a record drop in the BTC price, following the Coronavirus pandemic and very severe travel and trade restrictions imposed by almost every country across the globe. This also included the new travel restrictions announced by US President Donald Trump in a bid to tackle the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus.
March 12 saw the Dow and FTSE take their worst hit since the Black Monday crash of October 1987, which made the New York Federal Reserve pump $1.5 trillion into the American financial system as an emergency action.
The crisis has been aggravated by a war of ego between Saudi Arabia and Russia as the oil prices also took a freefall amid collapsing global demand due to the COVID-19 outbreak.
Veteran trader and an outspoken BTC critic Peter Brandt — who also correctly predicted the collapse of the 2017 crypto market bull run — tweeted his view of the BTC/USD market collapse on March 12:
“If I interpret the chart without bias, I would say sub $1,000.”
Apart from Bitcoin taking a beating and registering a 2-year low, altcoin prices also took a turn for the worse.
Snowden’s remarks on the BTC situation and a show of buying intention unsurprisingly polarized the masses on social media, with one side using the hashtag “#bitcoinblackfriday” and calling the drop as the “sale of the decade” while another sarcastically quipping:
“Try to buy some toilet paper right now. Use a US-based VPN server.”
Snowden’s positive view of Bitcoin is nothing new; he has shown his inclination towards the concept several times before.
For instance, in March 2018, he emphasized: “digital scarcity” as the coin’s “fundamental innovation” at a hearing on the future of crypto regulation in the U.S.
Also in fall 2019, Snowden hinted towards reverting to Bitcoin to circumvent U.S. government‘s blockade on his publication, Permanent Record’s profits.
More interestingly, Snowden paid for the servers used in 2013 to leak thousands of documents mainly using Bitcoin, although he has also voiced concerns over the crypto, calling the blockchain as “devastatingly public.”
In March 2018, he confessed that he is using Monero, and also backed Zcash, calling it as the “most interesting” altcoin in the market due to its “unique” privacy framework.
As for the Bitcoin at that time, he said that “the much larger structural flaw, the long-lasting flaw, is its public ledger.”