Free speech champions internationally celebrated earlier this week as Julian Assange – founding father of WikiLeaks – was lastly launched from a UK jail after 5 years behind bars.
Throughout his greater than decade-long authorized battle to flee persecution from a number of nationwide governments, Assange typically leaned on crypto to drive international fundraising campaigns to safe his freedom. A newly resurfaced video from years earlier than Assange’s arrest reveals him praising cryptocurrencies as a strong device for freedom.
What Julian Assange Thinks of Bitcoin
Within the September 2014 clip shared by MicroStrategy government chairman Michael Saylor, Assange calls Bitcoin the “most attention-grabbing mental growth on the web” for the reason that community’s inception in 2009.
“Lots of people who’ve heard about Bitcoin don’t actually perceive it,” he mentioned on the time. “It’s a foreign money that’s cryptographically backed and multi-jurisdictional, which implies it’s very laborious for anyone energy group…to begin turning it right into a rent-seeking equipment.”
Years after this speech, nations like El Salvador and firms like Strike have begun leveraging Bitcoin as a device for sending and receiving low-cost, instantaneous international remittances.
Furthermore, Bitcoin and crypto have turn out to be main instruments for simply funding international humanitarian actions, together with Ukraine’s army protection in opposition to Russia or Israel’s help for victims of Hamas.
But this isn’t even considered one of Bitcoin’s major advantages, in response to Assange. One of many community’s greatest qualities, he mentioned, is its capacity to “defend itself or the individuals who use it in opposition to even the complete may of a superpower.”
Bitcoin Breaking Orwell’s Dictum
“The opposite underlying fundamental expertise is proof of publication at a selected time,” he continued. With Bitcoin’s blockchain working a ledger of true occasions that can not be altered, he argued that the community can “break Orwell’s dictum” arguing that “he who controls the current controls the previous.”
Certainly, Bitcoin has been used repeatedly as a device for bypassing sanctions positioned by nationwide governments – for higher or for worse. In 2022, the Canadian Trucker convoy protesting nationwide vaccine mandates turned to Bitcoin to lift funds when conventional fee platforms like GoFundMe blocked donations.
Assange himself turned to crypto for funding after being jailed in the UK, together with over $54 million in ETH by means of AssangeDAO.
“That’s the large enlargement we’re about to see in Bitcoin – all of it derives type this fundamental premise,” concluded Assange. “You may show a selected contract occurred at a selected time, globally.”