This article was published in Bitcoin Magazine “The question of inscription.” Click here For your annual subscription to Bitcoin Magazine.
For most of its life, Bitcoin has been viewed as a cash network, where users can send and receive the BTC token. Due to the massive rise in prices since its creation in 2009, the monetary commodity has also become a store of value – a means by which a person can store his valuable hours of labor so that they are not diminished and instead experience an increase in purchasing power rather than an increase in purchasing power. Loss.
However, not all users are the same. Despite the popularity of these monetary narratives, some outcasts have used Bitcoin for all sorts of purposes over time. Most notably, Julian Assange, a now-famous journalist and political prisoner, and the creator of WikiLeaks, used Bitcoin for various reasons, including as a proof-of-life mechanism and verifiable proof of publication. For Assange, Bitcoin was and remains much more than a distributed cash system that solves the double spending problem inherent in digital cash. For the journalist, Bitcoin can serve so much more, and as he fights for his life, others join him in this mission.
Now, before we delve into the complexities of what Bitcoin is and what it could be for Assange and his supporters, let's take a step back and see what the journalist has done with the digital currency since the first time his NGO embraced Bitcoin.
In 2010, shortly after WikiLeaks published US diplomatic cables into the infamous Chelsea Manning leaks, Assange's organization was cut off from the global banking system as Bank of America, Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal stopped serving the online platform. This reality prompted Assange to embrace Bitcoin, and in June 2011 the WikiLeaks Twitter account announced that it would begin accepting Bitcoin donations.
Interestingly, WikiLeaks expressed interest in adopting Bitcoin much earlier than June 2011, and according to posts on the then-popular BitcoinTalk forum, Satoshi discouraged Assange from following this path in December 2010. Why? “Bitcoin is a small, early experimental community. You won't get much more than pocket change, and the heat it will bring us will likely destroy us at this point.” WikiLeaks patiently waited another six months before accepting Bitcoin.
Ironically, Assange later praised the US government for issuing this coordinated attack, which of course led to WikiLeaks embracing Bitcoin and subsequently led to a dollar capital appreciation of more than a thousand percent. It is interesting and funny that the fact that WikiLeaks was blacked out of the mainstream financial system simply for publishing leaked documents would lead them to a much better financial situation – one where they do not need to ask for permission and can enjoy high dollar financial gains. My hair.
In September 2014, Assange began hinting at other potential use cases he saw for Bitcoin, which, given his tone and presentation, leads one to believe he was more passionate about this than financial speculation — however large the gains might be with the monetary use case:
“Bitcoin is a very important innovation, but not in the way that most people think about it. The true innovation of Bitcoin is globally verifiable proof of deployment at a given time. The entire system is built on this concept and many other systems can also be built on it. Blockchain technology It proves history, and breaks Orwell's saying, “He who controls the present controls the past, and he who controls the past controls the future.”
Two years later, the use of Bitcoin as a timestamp server for WikiLeaks documents began to emerge, although it is not clear whether it was WikiLeaks itself or grassroots activists doing the timestamps. A Reddit user posted on r/WikiLeaks that someone had time-stamped hashes of some WikiLeaks torrent files, likely using OpenTimestamps – an open source tool created by Bitcoin developer Peter Todd for this purpose.
He spoke with Gabriel Shipton, a film producer and Assange's brother Bitcoin Magazine On the early days of his brother’s interactions with Bitcoin:
“In 2011, Julian recognized the power of Bitcoin to build an “intellectual scaffold” for civilization, a protocol that allows any reference to human intellectual contributions to be independently verified, without relying on any organization. Bitcoin excited him greatly not only because it is the most censorship-resistant method of publication possible. , but also for what it provided: the ability to build a great marvel of knowledge, a crucial tool in humanity's struggle against ignorance.
Assange's thought process on Bitcoin's use cases is meaningful not only because it highlights an entirely new use for the decentralized network, but also because of how early he said it. Assange saw this potential more than a decade ago, but it will not be until Ordinals that this use case will be deployed in a meaningful way.
Ordinals, which launched on the Bitcoin mainnet at the beginning of 2023, allows anyone to easily add random data to a Bitcoin block at any moment. Once that data is added, it inherits the stability and security of Bitcoin, and can fulfill Assange's vision of verifiably publishing at that moment. The inscriptions go even further. In addition to containing a timestamp that enables proof of publication, which users attempted with torrent trackers as early as 2016, Ordinals enables direct publication of the same data to Bitcoin. Not only is there a consistent record of time and date in terms of block height, there is now also the possibility of publishing the actual contents of the article or torrent link itself. A new era of block space utilization for Bitcoin.
Naturally, we saw the launch of this new protocol lead to a large number of JPEG files being published in batches. In the early days, some were just random memes, but soon after they were released, miners began to evolve, developing replication techniques, and even burning Ethereum-based NFT blocks. Now, almost a full year later, Ordinals has created an entirely new ecosystem in Bitcoin, allowing all kinds of different technical and software developments to occur on the “mother chain.”
However, some projects have begun to emerge that have been trying to meet Assange's vision since 2014. These projects vary in shape, size and format, but all appear to be seeking to capture Bitcoin and the potential Ordinals brings to do something more than just speculate on the images and videos posted on Bitcoin.
In particular, a project emerged in October 2023 that sought to enable anyone in the world to add to Bitcoin the cables published in the leaks that banned WikiLeaks from the global financial system in 2010. Thanks to Ordinals, this project was able to not only allow timestamping of cables, But also the actual recording and storage of the pure content itself. The Spartacus project turned Bitcoin into something like the Library of Alexandria – a library that cannot be changed or destroyed, no matter how powerful the opponent.
In this case, the leaks expose war crimes committed by the US armed forces and government, revealing facts that starkly contradict the main narratives promoted by the media and the government itself about what was happening on the ground in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. .
Thirteen years after those cables turned a journalist into a political prisoner, this grassroots project has emerged to stand in solidarity with Assange and claim “I am Assange.” A reference to the famous “I, Spartacus” scene in the 1960 film Spartacusthe Spartacus Project invites Bitcoin users from all over the world to say “I am Assange” and sign up for Bitcoin those cables that started it all.
Project Spartacus aims to take a stand on freedom of information and knowledge, making it impossible for anyone to tamper with the data Assange risked his life to publish. The journalist currently faces possible extradition to the United States, despite being an Australian citizen and did not commit the alleged crimes on US soil. The outcome of the extradition process remains uncertain, and concerns continue to grow about his future and whether he will ever regain his freedom.
The Spartacus Project website provides a public interface through which anyone can “register” — the ordinal term for adding data to Bitcoin — in the war log. There appear to be no fees associated with this procedure except for the network fee, which is a necessary element of any transaction submitted to the Bitcoin network. The page also contains a “Donate” button, which opens a panel where users can optionally send Bitcoin to Assange's cause. The donations are said to go to support the following organizations: the Press Freedom Foundation, the Information Rights Project, and Reporters Without Borders.
Bitcoin Magazine spoke With the anonymous creators of the technology behind Project Spartacus, who shed some light on the process and mission:
“Every war log a user records through the Spartacus Project is a file containing the original content from one of the 76,911 Afghan war diary logs. We chose the Ordinals protocol for its widespread adoption, even in its infancy, as a standard for storing immutable data, simply because we believe That Bitcoin is the most immutable and uncensored technology for this use case is because every record, its data is included in Bitcoin to be easily published and found by any of Bitcoin's many clients and Ordinals. We see this use case of Bitcoin as essential to human rights and freedom Stand with Julian Assange by storing this sensitive data on Bitcoin with us.
When navigating to the site, the user finds a huge rectangular button on the home page, which says “Publish War Log.” When clicked, the war log recording process is started. The user is given the option to choose the number of records to record, with a maximum of 300 war records per transaction. The user can then select the transaction fee, based on which the total amount of the payment is calculated. When they click Continue, the user should be redirected to checkout.
The creators of the Spartacus project gave the files a graphical treatment by choosing SVG files, which still contain the raw log data as a comment field, while giving the user a way to easily view the information. The project revolves around Ordinals' common use case for digital tools to focus on the entire downstream data of a decentralized information chain, managed by tens of thousands of nodes in hundreds of different jurisdictions around the world.
In this sense, as Assange once envisioned, Bitcoin has indeed become more than just a financial asset – it is now a beacon of hope for those struggling against the suppression of truth and the distortion of history.
This article was published in Bitcoin Magazine “The question of inscription.” Click here For your annual subscription to Bitcoin Magazine.