Free speech champions the world over 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 usually 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 robust software 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 fascinating mental growth on the web” because the community’s inception in 2009.
“Lots of people who’ve heard about Bitcoin don’t actually perceive it,” he stated on the time. “It’s a forex that’s cryptographically backed and multi-jurisdictional, which implies it’s very exhausting for anybody energy group…to begin turning it right into a rent-seeking equipment.”
Years after this speech, nations like El Salvador and corporations like Strike have begun leveraging Bitcoin as a software for sending and receiving low-cost, prompt 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 assist for victims of Hamas.
But this isn’t even one in every of Bitcoin’s major advantages, based on Assange. One of many community’s finest qualities, he stated, is its means to “defend itself or the individuals who use it in opposition to even the total would possibly of a superpower.”
Bitcoin Breaking Orwell’s Dictum
“The opposite underlying fundamental know-how 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 software 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 boost 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 via AssangeDAO.
“That’s the massive growth we’re about to see in Bitcoin – all of it derives kind this fundamental premise,” concluded Assange. “You’ll be able to show a selected contract occurred at a selected time, globally.”
