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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: 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.

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