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posted by martyb on Monday October 16 2017, @01:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the silver-(bitcoin)-lining dept.

From the Law of Unintended Consequences:

Endurance couch-surfer and WikiLeaker-in-chief Julian Assange has thanked US authorities for the banking blockade that made it hard to donate fiat currencies to his organisation, because it inadvertently enriched the organisation.

The blockade first appeared in 2010, after the United States expressed its ire at WikiLeaks' publication of diplomatic cables. Not long afterwards, Mastercard and Visa stopped processing donations sent to the site.

WikiLeaks sued and won against Visa, but the blockade persisted. The organisation therefore sought alternative funding including Bitcoin.

Which brings us to an Assange Tweet from Sunday, as follows.

My deepest thanks to the US government, Senator McCain and Senator Lieberman for pushing Visa, MasterCard, Payal, AmEx, Mooneybookers, et al, into erecting an illegal banking blockade against @WikiLeaks starting in 2010. It caused us to invest in Bitcoin -- with > 50000% return. pic.twitter.com/9i8D69yxLC
        — Julian Assange 🔹 (@JulianAssange) October 14, 2017

> 50,000%?


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 16 2017, @02:12PM (7 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 16 2017, @02:12PM (#582996) Journal

    > 50,000%?

    Think of all the characters he saved. Virtual donkeys can only carry so many characters. So an obvious question - how much has Wikileaks benefited by this run up in Bitcoin? Story notes that Wikileaks finances are "opaque".

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 16 2017, @02:26PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 16 2017, @02:26PM (#583001)

    Think of all the characters he saved.

    UNICODE or ASCII?

    So an obvious question - how much has Wikileaks benefited by this run up in Bitcoin? Story notes that Wikileaks finances are "opaque".

    Another obvious quote: how much the NSA budget grew the NSA budget since 2013 [theverge.com]?
    Unlike Wikileaks, NSA is funded by public money, yet I note that the NSA budget is not only opaque, it's black.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 16 2017, @07:05PM (3 children)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 16 2017, @07:05PM (#583107) Journal

      Another obvious quote: how much the NSA budget grew the NSA budget since 2013 [theverge.com]? Unlike Wikileaks, NSA is funded by public money, yet I note that the NSA budget is not only opaque, it's black.

      Well, I think it's probably less than bitcoins grew in value else they'd be building moon bases or the like.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 17 2017, @03:11AM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 17 2017, @03:11AM (#583285)

        ...or the like

        Perhaps a 200 acre[1] data center [google.com] where there is no natural source of water?

        [1] 8.7e6 square feet; 0.81 square kilometer

        Shouldn't be long now before they go extraterrestrial.

        -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 17 2017, @03:41AM (1 child)

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 17 2017, @03:41AM (#583299) Journal

          Perhaps a 200 acre data center where there is no natural source of water?

          How much water does a data center need?

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Snow on Monday October 16 2017, @03:30PM

    by Snow (1601) on Monday October 16 2017, @03:30PM (#583018) Journal

    Well the Bitcoin part is pretty transparent...

    Here is their address: https://blockchain.info/address/1HB5XMLmzFVj8ALj6mfBsbifRoD4miY36v [blockchain.info]

    They have received 4025 BTC. You could go though the transaction history and correlate that to the price at the time transaction took place to get a pretty good idea of how much money we are talking about.

    That address currently holds 7.5BTC ( ~42,000 USD). I'm guessing that they also must have another address that they use for cold storage. You could probably find it by looking at the transaction history.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 16 2017, @04:19PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 16 2017, @04:19PM (#583036)

    According to Wikipedia, [wikipedia.org] in Feb 2011 (the first given date where I'm sure that it is after the mentioned ban), 1 BTC = $1. The lowest given value in September 2017 is $2900. This is a factor of 2900.

    Now a >50 000% win means a factor >500 (well actually >501), which is considerably lower. But then, the donation were surely coming in not only in 2010, but also in the following years. Therefore parts of the bitcoins they got went only through part of the value gain. Therefore the factor of roughly 500 seems plausible to me.