Nine years ago today, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange made his most substantive public comments on the nature of bitcoin, a five-year-old project that had just burst into the financial mainstream by surpassing $1,000 the previous year.
At the time, Assange was not new to bitcoin. In fact, Wikileaks had discussed bitcoin acceptance since 2010, when users first made efforts to introduce the news agency to the payment method.
Ultimately, Wikileaks began accepting bitcoin in 2011, a move the organization has since credited with helping break its banking blockade in the wake of the release of classified US government information.
Said that,an interview from 2014unearthed by bitcoin historian Pete Rizzo, shows that Assange was equally convinced of the technology years later.
In the video, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange makes a bold statement about bitcoin that has since been proven to be remarkably accurate. In the interview, Assange called bitcoin “the most interesting thing on the Internet,” and his words have aged as the cryptocurrency has seen a staggering rise in value over the years.
At the time of the interview, bitcoin was trading at a fraction of its current value, but Wikileaks was using the technology as a publishing platform, in part, to prove the existence of the information it published.
Elsewhere in the interview, Assange discussed the nature of bitcoin, and cryptography in general, as a tool for civilians to resist government overreach.
“The ability of cryptography to create situations where it can defend the people who use it against the total power of a superpower. The total power of a superpower does not help solve a mathematical problem,” he said. “It is not something that can be achieved by overwhelming coercive power.”
Assange’s foresight regarding the importance of bitcoin is evident when we consider the remarkable trajectory of the cryptocurrency’s price since the interview. In 2014, bitcoin was trading at approximately $380 per coin across all exchanges.
Fast forward to 2023, and bitcoin is trading at $28,000, up more than 7,000% in the nine years since.
As bitcoin continues to mature and gain acceptance, it remains closely linked to the principles of decentralization and censorship resistance that Assange and WikiLeaks championed. Assange is still in prison for publishing key information of public interest and his fight for freedom remains a fundamental cause of bitcoin.
