Here’s What He Believes About Bitcoin

Free speech champions around the world celebrated earlier this week the release of Julian Assange – the founder of WikiLeaks – from a UK prison after five years behind bars.

During his decade-long legal battle to escape persecution from multiple national governments, Assange has often relied on cryptocurrencies to drive global fundraising campaigns to secure his freedom. A newly resurfaced video from years before Assange’s arrest shows him praising cryptocurrencies as a powerful tool for freedom.

What does Julian Assange think about Bitcoin?

In the September 2014 clip subscriber By Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy, Assange described Bitcoin as “the most interesting intellectual development on the internet” since the network was created in 2009.

“A lot of people who have heard of bitcoin don’t really understand it,” he said at the time. “It’s a crypto-backed, multi-jurisdictional currency, which means it’s very difficult for any powerful group… to start turning it into a rent-seeking machine.”

Years after this rhetoric, countries like El Salvador and companies like Strike began to leverage Bitcoin as a tool for sending and receiving cheap and instant global money transfers.

Moreover, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies have become leading tools for easily funding global humanitarian movements, including Ukraine’s military defense against Russia or Israel’s support for Hamas victims.

However, this is not even one of the core benefits of Bitcoin, according to Assange. One of the network’s best qualities, he said, is its ability to “defend itself or the people using it even against the full might of a superpower.”

Bitcoin breaks Orwell’s dictum

“The other core technology behind this is proof-of-time,” he continued. With Bitcoin’s blockchain running an immutable record of real events, he claimed the network could “break Orwell’s dictum” that “whoever controls the present controls the past.”

In fact, Bitcoin has been frequently used as a tool to circumvent sanctions imposed by national governments – for better or worse. In 2022, a caravan of Canadian truckers protesting the nationwide vaccine mandate turned to Bitcoin to raise money when traditional payment platforms like GoFundMe blocked donations.

Assange himself turned to cryptocurrencies for funding after his imprisonment in the United Kingdom, including more than $54 million in Ethereum through AssangeDAO.

“This is the great expansion we are about to see in Bitcoin – it all derives from this basic premise,” Assange concluded. “You can prove that a particular contract occurred at a particular time globally.”