WikiLeaks accepts Bitcoin after an extralegal payment blockade demonstrates exactly what the network was built to resist

JUN 14 2011 · 12:05

Video: WikiLeaks, Bitcoin, and the Fight Against Financial Blockades #shorts Date: 2011-06-14 · Type: bitcoin · Tags: wikileaks, assange, payment-blockade, censorship-resistance, financial-sovereignty, satoshi, cablegate The project needs to grow gradually so the software can be strengthened — it would have been nice to get this attention in any other context. After Cablegate in November 2010, Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Western Union, and Bank of America together cut off donations to WikiLeaks. No court ordered the blockade; the State Department merely declined to discourage it. The action was the first vivid demonstration of payment-rail political risk in the post-9/11 financial architecture: that the infrastructure of money transfer could be weaponized against disfavored publishers without judicial process, due to the oligopolistic concentration of the settlement layer. Satoshi had seen it coming and opposed it. His December 12 2010 forum post — his last — explicitly asked that Bitcoin not be attached to the WikiLeaks situation, arguing that the project needed to grow gradually before drawing the attention of governments. Six months after Satoshi withdrew, WikiLeaks announced Bitcoin acceptance anyway. The decision was Julian Assange's, and its vindication was financial: Assange later credited the decision with a "50,000% return" on WikiLeaks' treasury as Bitcoin's price rose through the years of his embassy confinement. The episode's importance was conceptual before it was economic. It provided the first non-libertarian press argument for censorship-resistant money — one grounded not in ideology but in recent documented fact. Every subsequent "Bitcoin is for sanctions evasion" story, and every counter-argument about financial sovereignty, traces its rhetorical structure to the 2010–2011 blockade and WikiLeaks' response to it. Facts • Payment blockade by Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Western Union, Bank of America: December 2010 • No court order required; State Department expressed informal discouragement only • WikiLeaks Bitcoin acceptance announced via @wikileaks Twitter, June 14 2011 • Donation address 1HB5XMLmzFVj8ALj6mfBsbifRoD4miY36v received over 4,000 BTC by end of 2011 • Satoshi's last forum post (December 12 2010) had explicitly warned against WikiLeaks involvement • Assange later described Bitcoin as providing a '50,000% return' relative to the blocked-donation period Primary Documents • Satoshi's December 12 2010 BitcoinTalk post on WikiLeaks — https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2216.msg29280#msg29280