Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee and famed whistleblower Edward Snowden is emphasizing that Bitcoin is falling short on privacy. During the Ethereal Virtual Summit 2021, Snowden says Bitcoin is massively failing to provide users with anonymity amid advances in technology that make surveillance easier. We have no idea how the banks are used to perform sort of surveillance and link analysis of how certain financial flows occur, but then we get cryptocurrency. Now cryptocurrency, and by this, I'm just going to say Bitcoin, is really failing comprehensively, terribly on the privacy angle." Snowden adds he is not convinced that Bitcoin's upcoming Taproot upgrade, which aims to improve Bitcoin's ability to mask complex transactions on the public ledger, will be the magic bullet that solves the leading crypto asset's privacy woes. "Taproot does not fix Bitcoin's privacy problem, and there are some arguments that it makes it worse by this sort of fragmented address space making a forensic sort of flow analysis easier." He also notes that privacy-focused cryptocurrencies like Zcash (ZEC) and Monero (XMR) exist, but these crypto assets have weaknesses.