According to a post on the Reddit r/bitcoin community, an old file has been discovered that may be linked to Julian Assange, the whistleblower and founder of Wikileaks. The encrypted 7zip file is found in the exit script of a transaction that took place on January 5, 2017, and was mined at block 446,713.
Speculation surrounds the purpose of the 7zip file named ‘Julianassange.Txt’ found on the Bitcoin blockchain
Amid the thousands of entries added to the Bitcoin blockchain via Ordinals, a 7zip file possibly linked to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was recently discovered. A Reddit user with the name “u/sprxzk34620” informed Discovery’s r/bitcoin subreddit. The post read: “An encrypted 7zip file possibly related to Julian Assange is hidden on the Bitcoin blockchain.” The author also pointed out that the file could be obtained by splicing together the pubkhash segment of all the output scripts of a specific transaction.
“The encrypted 7zip archive contains a file called ‘Julianassange.txt’, but attempts to decrypt the file have failed,” the Reddit user added. Commenters on Reddit post asked why Assange would add this to the Bitcoin blockchain and some referred to speculation that he created a “dead man’s switch”. “It could be an encrypted link to the switch or files that expose secrets,” wrote a person. Others had doubts and fixed that a zip file named “Julianassange.txt” sounds like a hoax.
Coincidentally, the January 5, 2017 transaction with the 7zip file occurred five days before Assange read the hash of the Bitcoin blockchain from block height. 447,506 in a recorded video. At the time, many believed that the whistleblower used this tactic to prove that he was alive. Despite being alive, Assange claimed that he was not well while he was confined in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
“Don’t take some cryptographic proof as evidence that I’m okay,” he stressed at the time. “I am not. They have kept me here for eight years. I have not been well all the time.” Assange’s Ecuadorian asylum has since been revoked and he has been arrested on April 11, 2019, when the police raided the embassy. The content of the 7zip file is unknown until someone successfully cracks it, as it may not belong to or be associated with Assange at all.
The Reddit post written by u/sprxzk34620 ended with a heated discussion about whether adding arbitrary data to the Bitcoin blockchain through Ordinals was a legitimate practice, as it has sparked controversy among some Bitcoin advocates. “If everyone is going to post stupid JPEGs of cats on the blockchain, I can keep buying new hard drives for my node…Fuck that shit**. Keep it compact folks,” a Redditor stressed.
What do you think the contents of the encrypted 7zip file could reveal? Let us know your thoughts on this topic in the comments section below.
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