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For most of its life, Bitcoin has been viewed as a monetary network that allows users to send and receive its native token BTC. Given the significant price increases since the start of 2009, monetary goods have also become stores of value. This is a means by which someone can save up their valuable working time, ensure that their working hours do not decline, and instead experience an increase in their purchasing power. loss.
However, not all users are the same. Despite the popularity of these money stories, some outcasts have used Bitcoin for all kinds of purposes throughout the ages. Most notably, Julian Assange, now famous journalist, political prisoner, and founder of WikiLeaks, used Bitcoin for a variety of reasons, including proof-of-life mechanisms and verifiable proof of publication. is. For Assange, Bitcoin was and is much more than a decentralized monetary system that solves the double-spending problem inherent in digital cash. For the journalist, Bitcoin can do more than that, and while he is fighting for his life, others are joining him in the mission.
Now, before we dive into the complex question of what Bitcoin is and could be for Assange and his supporters, let’s take a step back and see what journalists have learned since his NGO first adopted Bitcoin. Let’s take a look at what we’ve been doing with this digital coin.
In 2010, shortly after WikiLeaks released US diplomatic cables in the infamous Chelsea Manning leak, Assange’s organization became the world’s largest bank, with Bank of America, Visa, Mastercard and PayPal suspending their online platforms. disconnected from the system. That reality prompted Assange to adopt Bitcoin, and in June 2011, WikiLeak’s Twitter account announced that it would begin accepting Bitcoin donations.
Interestingly, WikiLeaks expressed interest in adopting Bitcoin much earlier than June 2011, and Satoshi suggested Assange that route in December 2010, according to a post on the popular forum BitcoinTalk at the time. It is said that he was discouraged from pursuing this. What’s their reason? “Bitcoin is still a small beta community in its infancy. You won’t be able to bear getting anything more than pocket change, and at this stage with the heat you bring we’ll probably WikiLeaks waited patiently for another six months before accepting Bitcoin.
Ironically, Assange would later praise the US government for carrying out this coordinated attack, which naturally led to WikiLeak’s adoption of Bitcoin, which has since increased in value by more than 1,000 percent in dollar terms. Ta. The fact that WikiLeaks was locked out of the mainstream financial system simply for publishing leaked documents puts WikiLeaks in a much better financial position, not having to obtain permission and enjoying huge financial benefits. is both interesting and funny at the same time. In dollar terms. Poetic.
In September 2014, Assange began hinting at other uses for Bitcoin, but his tone and manner of speaking suggest that he may have been more passionate about Bitcoin than financial speculation. Financial use case:
“Bitcoin is a very important innovation, but not in the way most people think. Bitcoin’s true innovation is the globally verifiable evidence that it was issued at a specific time. The entire system is built on that concept, and many others can be built on it as well. Blockchain reveals history and says, ‘Who controls the present controls the past. Breaking Orwell’s dictum, “The person controls the future.”
A few years later, the use of Bitcoin as a timestamping server for WikiLeaks documents began to surface, but it was unclear whether WikiLeaks themselves or grassroots activists were doing the time stamping. A Reddit user posted on r/WikiLeaks that someone time-stamped the hashes of WikiLeaks torrent files, likely using OpenTimestamps (which Bitcoin developer Peter Todd created for this purpose). It seems that it used an open source tool created by the company.
Gabriel Shipton, Assange’s brother and film producer, said: bitcoin magazine On his brother’s early involvement with Bitcoin:
“Julian in 2011 recognized the power of Bitcoin to create an ‘intellectual scaffolding’ for civilization, a protocol that allows all references to human intellectual contributions to be independently verified, without dependence on any organization. Bitcoin excites him not only because it is the most censorship-resistant publishing method possible, but also because of what it offers: its importance in the fight against human ignorance. It is also a tool for the ability to construct great wonders of knowledge.
Assange’s thought process regarding Bitcoin’s use cases is significant not only because it uncovers entirely new uses for decentralized networks, but also because of how quickly they were announced. Assange recognized this potential over a decade ago, but it wasn’t until the release of Ordinals that this use case became popular in a meaningful way.
Launched on Bitcoin mainnet in early 2023, Ordinals makes it easy for anyone to add any data to Bitcoin blocks at any time. Once that data is added, it inherits Bitcoin’s immutability and security, at which point Assange’s vision of verifiable public proofs can be realized. The inscription goes further. Ordinals not only stores timestamps that enable public proofs, which users attempted with torrent tracker files in 2016, but also allows them to directly publish the data themselves on Bitcoin. Not only can you immutably record the date and time in the block height, but you can now also publish the actual content of the article and the torrent link itself. A new era of Bitcoin block space usage.
Unsurprisingly, with the launch of this new protocol, we’ve seen a large number of JPEGs published in blocks. In the early days, some were just random memes, but shortly after its release, authors began to get sophisticated, developing recursion techniques and even teleburning Ethereum-based NFT collections. Now, almost a full year later, Ordinals has built a whole new ecosystem on Bitcoin, allowing all kinds of art and software development to happen on the “mother chain.”
But as far back as 2014, several projects began to emerge that sought to live up to Assange’s vision. These projects come in all shapes, sizes, and forms, but all seem to be exploring the possibilities offered by Bitcoin and Ordinals to actually do more than that. Guess the images and videos published in Bitcoin.
Most notably, a project that allows anyone in the world to add to Bitcoin the cables published in the leak that led to WikiLeaks being banned from the global financial system in 2010 will be announced in October 2023. It appeared. Thanks to Ordinals, this project was able to: It allows you to not only timestamp your cables, but actually write and store the unadulterated content itself. Project Spartacus turned Bitcoin into something like the Library of Alexandria. No matter how powerful the enemy is, it cannot be changed or destroyed.
In this case, the leaks expose war crimes by the U.S. military and the U.S. government, revealing facts that are in stark contrast to the mainstream narrative pushed by the media and the government itself about what was happening on the ground in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It turns out. .
Thirteen years after these cables turned journalists into political prisoners, this grassroots project has emerged to stand in solidarity with Assange and say, “I am Assange.” Alluding to the famous “I, Spartacus” scene from the 1960 film. spartacusProject Spartacus invites Bitcoin users around the world to declare “I am Assange” and inscribe the cable that started it all into Bitcoin.
Project Spartacus aims to take a stand for freedom of information and knowledge, ensuring that no one can tamper with the data that Assange risked his life to publish. The journalist is now an Australian citizen and faces possible extradition to the United States, even though he did not commit the alleged crime on U.S. soil. The outcome of the extradition process remains uncertain, and concerns about his future and whether he will ever be able to regain his freedom continue to grow.
The Project Spartacus website provides a public interface where anyone can “carve” a war record (an ordinal term for adding data to Bitcoin). There appear to be no fees associated with this action, except for network fees, which are a necessary element for transactions sent to the Bitcoin network. The page also has a “Donate” button that opens a panel where users can optionally send Bitcoin to Assange’s cause. The donations are said to be used to support the organizations Freedom of the Press Foundation, The Information Rights Project, and Reporters Without Borders.
Bitcoin Magazine said With the anonymous creators of the technology behind Project Spartacus, we shed light on their process and mission.
“Each war log completed by a user through Project Spartacus is a file containing the original content from one of the 76,911 Afghanistan War Diary records. We chose the Ordinals protocol because even in its early stages, This is because we believe Bitcoin is the most immutable and uncensorable technology for this use case, as it is widely adopted as the standard for immutable data storage. is embedded and propagated in Bitcoin and is easily found by any of the many Bitcoin and Ordinal clients. We believe this use case for Bitcoin is important for human rights and freedoms. We hope you will support Julian Assange by storing your sensitive data in Bitcoin with us.”
Upon accessing the website, users will find a giant rectangular button on the main page that says “Publish War Records.” Clicking will trigger the process of writing the war record. Users are given the option to select the number of logs to record. Up to 300 war logs can be logged per transaction. The user selects the transaction fee and the total payout is calculated based on it. After clicking “Continue”, the user will likely be redirected to make the payment.
By choosing an SVG file that contains the raw log data as a comment field, the creators of Project Spartacus made it easy for users to view the information while processing the file graphically. This project revolutionizes the common use case for digital artifacts in Ordinals, providing complete data finality on a decentralized information chain run by tens of thousands of nodes in hundreds of different jurisdictions around the world. is focused on.
In this sense, Bitcoin has actually become more than just a financial asset, as Assange once envisioned, and a beacon of hope for those fighting against the suppression of truth and distortion of history.
This article was published in Bitcoin Magazine “Inscription problem”.click here Get an annual Bitcoin Magazine subscription.
