Bitcoin to resist censorship: the case of WikiLeaks

Bitcoin, since its launch, has also been used by WikiLeaks, the website that publishes secret documents and confidential information of public interest, through donations.

In this sense, one of the most important use cases of BTC is precisely to resist censorship, helping activists and political dissidents.

Summary

• Bitcoin resists censorship: continuous donations to the WikiLeaks website
• Bitcoin: on-chain analysis of donations to WikiLeaks
• Bitcoin Ordinals NFT: from files on the war to the first individual poetry

Bitcoin resists censorship: continuous donations to the WikiLeaks website

An on-chain analysis has shown how Bitcoin donations have helped the website WikiLeaks to continue its activities, against other forms of censorship.

WikiLeaks is a website that spreads secret documents, which have also shed light on numerous war crimes committed by the USA in Afghanistan and Iraq and beyond. Its founder, Julian Assange, is awaiting the outcome of an extradition request to the United States from England, where he has been detained for 12 years now. Assange faces up to 175 years in prison in the USA for violating a law on espionage.

Assange adopted Bitcoin as early as 2010, collecting over 4000 BTC over the years to fund his activities with Wikileaks, managing to bypass censorship.

And indeed, in 2010, while WikiLeaks was becoming famous for the amount of classified documents published, its founder began to be at the center of numerous legal and political controversies. Since 2010, Assange has been fighting against the extradition warrant from the USA.

Still in 2010, Assange saw donations to WikiLeaks blocked by international giants PayPal, Visa and Mastercard.

His activity was able to continue only thanks to the use of Bitcoin for donations, even though the protocol was only 1 year old. To date, the choice seems to have been also far-sighted, given that BTC price has grown by 12,500,000%, going from $0.40 to the current $50,000.

Bitcoin: on-chain analysis of donations to WikiLeaks

By choosing Bitcoin (BTC), the WikiLeaks platform was able to continue receiving donations to support its activities.

On-chain analysis, whose data is free and accessible to everyone, allows to identify BTC transactions made on behalf of WikiLeaks, highlighting the transparency that BTC brings to donations.

The wallet used for donations is 36EEHh9ME3kU7AZ3rUxBCyKR5FhR3RbqVo, a multi-sig address that increases the security of the wallet, as to move the funds it is necessary to sign the transaction with multiple wallets. For example, at this address, a donation of 4.5 BTC was made at the end of 2020.

This address has been receiving donations for six years, and over the years only 3 outgoing transactions have been made. The movements of these 3 addresses show transactions of a portion of the funds on various exchanges, such as Crypto.com, Coinbase Prime Deposit, BitPanda, BitStamp, and HTX.

Before the adoption of the multi-sig wallet, WikiLeaks used a simple legacy wallet, the first version of Bitcoin: 1HB5XMLmzFVj8ALj6mfBsbifRoD4miY36v.

The two WikiLeaks wallets have received, in 14 years of activity, a total of 4048 BTC which, as of February 19, 2024, have a value of 210,500,000 dollars.

Bitcoin Ordinals NFT: from files on the war to the first individual poetry

Bitcoin has not only been used for donations. With the explosion of Bitcoin Inscription, there is also a user who decided, in September 2023, to permanently and immutably inscribe on the blockchain, the files concerning the war in Afghanistan spread by Julian Assange’s platform in 2010.

In this way, every user who owns a full node will contribute to keeping these valuable files forever and without the possibility of deletion, files that many governments, especially the United States government, would have wanted to delete.

In addition to the war file, recently the first individual poem as Bitcoin Ordinals NFT was also presented, from the Natively Digital collection. The poem “Cord” by Ana Maria Caballera was sold at auction on Sotheby’s for 0.28 BTC, equivalent to $11,430.

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